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

An ongoing project to survey the best films of individual decades, genres, and filmmakers.
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domino harvey
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Re: 1990s List Discussion and Suggestions

#351 Post by domino harvey » Sat May 30, 2015 12:43 am

Final round of viewings before submitting my list and diving into the next decade:

Bodies, Rest & Motion (Michael Steinberg 1993) Amiable and artsy flick with a love rectangle forming between four Gen Xers who variously want, don't want, and/or don't know what they want. The whole film is but a series of longings and attempts at the intangible, with the biggest disappointments reserved for those who get what they thought they wanted only to be crushed by reality. I give a slight edge to this over Singles as far as serious attempts at depicting Generation X go, but I still like Empire Records' goofy messiness best.

Bongwater (Richard Sears 1997) It's a personal tradition for my marathon viewings of films for the list to only be halted when I come across a truly terrible film, and here it is, one of the worst films I've ever sat through. This movie is such a black hole of talent struggling against an utter void of value that it is worth foisting on your friends as an endurance test for bragging rights ("I lasted ten minutes!"). Here is a cast full of likable stars, some comedians, all capable of giving good perfs elsewhere, stuck within a comedy with no laughs, no jokes, and no comedic set-ups-- I'm not talking about a poor sense of timing or structure, I literally mean there is an absence of comedy in any sense of the term. Truly this tale of a pot dealer and his on-again/off-again relationship with a groupie (I tried to find a plot here to summarize and that's the best I can do) is one of the greatest unintentional anti-drug PSAs I've ever seen. No one is less interesting than stoners in real life, and transferring them to film and then giving them nothing to do but smoke pot on the couch and watch TV while giggling life away, as though merely presenting characters toking were enough to placate the target audience, is insulting to everyone, even potheads. About seventy minutes in, when I thought the film could not possibly get worse, only longer, the unthinkable happens: a character endures a "serious" rape scene, out of nowhere, for no reason, and it is never mentioned again afterwards. Shit's deep, maan. I don't care how many times I've said this, the bar keeps getting lowered: without question the worst film I've ever watched for one of these projects.

Flesh and Bone (Steve Kloves 1993) --A Spotlight-- A strong film and welcome rec, even if I didn't quite find room for it on my list. This was described as a mood piece in the recommendation and boy is it ever, especially in the superb opening sequence, wherein silence brings violence swiftly and cruelly. The film is about the kind of awful coincidences which occur regularly in crime fiction, of which this owes a bit of debt as Dennis Quaid plays a Texas vending machine big wheel (or as big as that distinction merits) who says little and seems at all times on the verge of wincing in pain and the relationships both old and new which bring him to some degree of peace for the actions at the beginning of the film. James Caan is colorful as Quaid's too-aggressively charming father and Meg Ryan didn't quite work for me as the stripper turned romantic interest, but to my eyes the film really belonged to Gwyneth Paltrow, who steals the picture in an early turn as the klepto beauty too far gone for any sense of reform or salvation. It's the kind of one-note performance that works because it never wavers from the negative reinforcement of the character's worst qualities and any fool could see she was on her way to stardom here.

It's the Rage (James D Stern 1999) Lightweight ensemble piece that I half-remembered from its original straight-to-pay-cable premiere, this anti-gun film is thankfully far more playful and arch in its treatment of gun violence than I recalled. The film's tone is set from the outset as Jeff Daniels shoots an "intruder" in his house and his wife Joan Allen stops in the middle of the aftermath to point out that he's ruined his new robe they got at Sundance with the blood splatter. This ain't art and the message is saved for the irony-dripped finale and title cards. This isn't a wishy-washy liberal movie either, but another of those "Random people interact and spill over into each other's lives" movies and the story concerns are all cheap shots, but the name-brand cast keep everything humming along so swimmingly it hardly matters-- my favorite interplay was the weirdo triangle that forms between Anna Paquin as the most brazenly white trash princess imaginable, Josh Brolin as the video store clerk who recommends Pepe le Moko to a customer looking for "adult" fare, and Giovanni Ribisi as Paquin's hotheaded ex-con brother who's interest in Paquin's sex life makes Tony Montana look like a cool dad. But everyone pulls their weight and the end result is slight but enjoyable. So, your standard issue Basic Cable Staple success story!

Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (Leos Carax 1991) Definitely an improvement over my only other exposure to Carax, the horrid (and tragically beloved) Holy Motors, this still has strains of the pained attempts at capturing and glorifying ugliness which made the more recent film so unbearable. But there are also unshakable images of inventiveness and beauty and the story is a compelling, if disturbing one. Juliette Binoche is quite good as well, to the surprise of no one. I was up in the air about the film for most of the running time, but when it was all over I had to admit it was worth the two hours I put into it-- but certainly not the millions upon millions of dollars Carax spent to make it.

Menace II Society (the Hughes Brothers 1993) Boyz N the Hood, for all its violence and sorrow, still offered hope. No such luck in this stylish and effective exploration of the worst the ghetto can offer. Here is a film devoid of hope, with characters caught in an endless cycle of showing off, mouthing off, getting off, ripping off, offing, and getting offed. Filmed with a color palate borrowed from liquor store neon signs, the film dwells on its violence, but no one but the stupidest of viewers could take the film's presentational approach to the nonstop barrage of empty, circular brutality as an endorsement. Sadly, while the film is well served by its cast, none of the characters here are as fully formed or memorable as those found in Singleton or Lee's seminal works, and while there's some logic to presenting many of the characters as exhibiting similar and somewhat interchangeable personas, the overall effect is lessened in comparison. Still, this is an amazingly assured debut feature to come from two twenty years olds!

Sliding Doors (Peter Howitt 1998) This is a movie like Harvey, where everyone seems to know and reference the premise, but few have actually seen it. Well, into the brave unknown I went and I found the twin tales of Gwyneth Paltrows who either do or do not catch a subway an almost successful experience. The problem isn't the gimmick, however, as it maintains some cleverness at the outset before the film just turns into two not-quite successful romantic comedies for the price of one. John Hannah is suitably doofy as one of the love interests, and Jeanne Tripplehorn is shrill in either half in what is a cheap and easy queen bitch role, and of course Paltrow has some fun with both sides (though not as memorably as Radha Mitchell in Woody Allen's crack at this bat). But the film's ending is a mistake, and is weirdly punitive for no other reason than to offer an easy "clever" button for what is, outside of the set-up, a duo of otherwise standard issue rom-dramedies.

Thank God He Met Lizzie (Cherie Nolan 1997) No one was saying "Thank God I rented this movie," I assure you. Poor Cate Blanchett: she got famous and then skeletons like this got licensed out of her closet for American distribution. 100% disposable and forgettable.

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Re: 1990s List Discussion and Suggestions

#352 Post by bamwc2 » Sat May 30, 2015 7:54 am

Before departing from this thread, Domino, I challenge you to justify your putting Andrew Bergman's Striptease in the number one spot on your list.

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domino harvey
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Re: 1990s List Discussion and Suggestions

#353 Post by domino harvey » Sat May 30, 2015 8:20 am

It's only number one because swo's archaic rules forbid me from just voting for it in all slots 1-50

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Re: 1990s List Discussion and Suggestions

#354 Post by bamwc2 » Sat May 30, 2015 8:30 am

domino harvey wrote:It's only number one because swo's archaic rules forbid me from just voting for it in all slots 1-50
Thanks. I knew you wouldn't disappoint.

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the preacher
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Re: 1990s List Discussion and Suggestions

#355 Post by the preacher » Sat May 30, 2015 11:52 am

Done. Country breakdown:

Argentina - 1
Austria - 1
Belgium - 3
Brazil - 1
Burkina Faso - 1
Canada - 1
China - 1
Denmark - 2
Finland - 1
France - 3
Hong Kong - 1
Iran - 1
Italy - 2
Japan - 1
Lebanon - 1
Mexico - 1
Netherlands - 1
Portugal - 1
Spain - 5
Sweden - 1
Taiwan - 1
Tunisia - 1
UK - 3
US - 12
Canada/Russia - 1
UK/Ireland - 1
US/Australia - 1

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Re: 1990s List Discussion and Suggestions

#356 Post by jindianajonz » Sat May 30, 2015 1:04 pm

If anything, this list project taught me that I really need to check out more 90's movies. I didn't have time to participate nearly as much as I liked, but thought I could pull something together anyway. However, as I pieced together my choices, I realized about half of them consisted of mainstream American movies, and am a bit embarassed about the similarities between my list and a generic top 90's films IMDB list. Then again, looking at some of my choices, I do think the early 90's were a mini golden age for American popcorn flicks, thanks to an awareness of the unpolished yet creative campiness of 80's action cinema but before the heavily manufactured, CGI-laden repetitions became the norm soon after. A lot of American films made my list not because they were well rounded, but because they managed to do one thing so well it was hard to keep them off.

If I had managed to watch more, I have a feeling that Chinese language films (which already have a monopoly on my top 3) would edge out a lot of the more mainstream stuff. I actually bought 8 or 9 of these films after reading some great write ups in this thread and others, but I sadly haven't had time to view most of them. The few I managed to watch were spectacular though, so I'm thankful to those who participated in this project for giving me that exposure.

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domino harvey
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Re: 1990s List Discussion and Suggestions

#357 Post by domino harvey » Sat May 30, 2015 3:07 pm

I hope you submitted your list anyways. We could use more (moderately) mainstream choices to counterbalance the arthouse leanings of most of these lists!

My tally:
Films watched for the project: 95 (28 of those in the last week!)
Films watched for the project that made my list: 4
Films new to my list since the last iteration of the List Project: 18
Films in my Top 5 expressly concerned with the relationship between two young women: 4
Most represented director: Woody Allen, as ever (5) (Tied for second place with two films apiece: PTA, Noah Baumbach, Claude Chabrol, Tim Robbins, Whit Stillman)
Most represented actor: JJL (5)

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swo17
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Re: 1990s List Discussion and Suggestions

#358 Post by swo17 » Sat May 30, 2015 3:25 pm

Both mainstream and arthouse films are doing just fine, though I'm sure that you or any other person looking at the results so far would think, to some extent, that for both kinds of films, other people are picking the wrong ones!

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A
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Re: 1990s List Discussion and Suggestions

#359 Post by A » Sat May 30, 2015 8:26 pm

The 90s really seems such a blind spot to me and a place where lots and lots could be discovered.
Still, I'm very happy with my Top 50, all masterpieces in my opinion, all able to compete with the best films from any decade, and all are personal favorites I've mostly seen numerous times.

Country breakdown:

USA: 21
Japan: 16
France: 9
Germany: 9
UK: 4
Hong Kong: 3
Italy: 2
Austria: 1
Czech Republic: 1
Lithuania: 1
Netherlands: 1
Russia: 1
Spain: 1
Taiwan: 1
Vietnam: 1
Yugoslavia: 1

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colinr0380
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Re: 1990s List Discussion and Suggestions

#360 Post by colinr0380 » Sun May 31, 2015 9:59 am

OK, I'll add a couple of films that I watched over this last week. Both of them are really good but sadly I'm unsure as to their wider availability (I'm working off decades old recorded from television VHS's here!):

Violence: The Last Resort (Dann eben mit Gewalt) (Rainer Kaufmann, 1993)

A fascinating German TV-movie, known in English as Violence: The Last Resort, that tackles a lot of inflammatory themes.

Two boxing buddies have their close friendship encroached upon by one of the guys getting a new girlfriend, who is Turkish. The other guy, seemingly inspired by his jealousy and perhaps unrequited sexual feelings for his friend, ends up being easy prey for the owner of the boxing club, who grooms him in the showers and inducts him into a neo-Nazi-style group of thugs, who in one shocking scene beat and sexually assault the girl on his behalf as the guy and his older mentor look on.

Eventually events build to a confrontation between the minorities and the thugs in which everyone has to show their true colours and choose sides. Though the powerful thing about this film is it illustrates that sometimes racism isn't just about hating the colour of someone's skin but can be much more complex, with people having their own deeper motivations for joining groups that then boil them down (for the benefit of everyone involved?) into 'just' racists, that might be highly personal to themselves. It also shows the dangerously seductive pull of a organised group preying on the vulnerable, giving them a purpose and meaning to their life (and a feeling of power and potency in the face of being made to feel insignificant) that they otherwise wouldn't have.

Leaving Lenin (Gadael Lenin) (Endaf Emlyn. 1994)

I've put this on my list at the very bottom as a sort of wildcard entry. I’m not sure if I could really defend this film if when people see it they don’t like it or find it rather broadly done in terms of its theme, but since recording and watching this film from a television screening in 1997 I’ve found its themes have stuck with me. If the measure of a good film is that it stays with you and you find it just coming to mind at the strangest moments, then Leaving Lenin works in that fashion for me. Last week was my first time re-watching it in five years or so (and fourth in total), and I found that I could still remember almost all of the key scenes quite vividly.

It certainly packs a lot of stuff in: it is a coming out story, a story of an intellectual Welsh communist visiting post-Soviet Union Russia and getting rather disillusioned, the role of art in life, the role of money in life, a rural versus urban contrast piece, features a low-key adultery subplot and throws up notions of what it is like to feel like an outcast or alternatively to find yourself becoming part of a group. Plus it is also a film about a group of teenagers getting separated from their authority figures and allowed to go wild in St Petersburg! Basically its all about everyone finding themselves and a new sense of purpose after having all previous certainties removed from them.

The plot involves a bunch of teens from Wales (the film itself is in Welsh and Russian) on a school trip with three of their teachers to St Petersburg. It is a trip to visit art galleries but it also seems for the female art teacher Eileen and her slightly older husband Mostyn to be a way of revisiting places they had previously visited during their honeymoon back ‘in the good old days’. There is another, younger teacher, Merv, along for the trip who is apparently more ambitious and aiming to be a school governor eventually, something which the older man is a little contemptuous of due to his Communist affiliations!

The teens have just as many problems too, especially the two loners of the party, the goth girl Rhian and the quiet artistic guy, Spike, both of whom get casually bullied by the other kids in the first few scenes. The Communist teacher also doesn’t really like the quiet artistic guy, mostly because the teen doesn’t follow his orders!

Anyway on the train from Moscow to St Petersburg the kids get left in their cabins while the three teachers go and have a drink in the restaurant car, only to find that the train is the kind that gets stopped and separated before going off into two different directions! (The language barrier is emphasised here, with Eileen, the only teacher to understand Russian, having gone to the bathroom at the crucial moment! This will also come up with the teens too, as Spike significantly is the only member of that group who can speak Russian). So the teens go on to St Petersburg whilst the teachers get trapped in the middle of nowhere!

While the teens settle in and start exploring the city, including meeting an artist and going to punk-metal concerts, the teachers end up debating the past versus the present, capitalism and shared ownership under the old regime. While the two guys spend the time getting drunk and arguing with each other (even if Mostyn never seems to realise, or if he does he doesn’t bring it up, that Eileen and Merv had a one off relationship whilst together at a conference), Eileen takes it upon herself to abandon them both and hitch a ride to St Petersburg to get to the kids quicker! (This is strangely in the same vein as some of Shinya Tsukamoto’s later films, in that the guys are fighting over both the direction of their lives and control over the woman in their life, only to become more obsessed with each other! Then when they finally finish clashing they find that the woman left a long time ago!) So the guys get sort of existentially trapped with each other, trudging forlornly through countryside and failing to hitch lifts, arguing with each other all the way! Until a medical issue bonds them again!

There's a bit of a sense of criticism of the way that only an outsider (and a left-leaning art teacher from Wales at that!) can have such naive ideas about life in Russia and Communist values, and that only that kind of person could have been able to keep their idealism tarnished but alive post the collapse of the Soviet Union. The guys often have their rather insular bubbles pricked by finding the capitalist tendencies of the new free market irksome (though they do quickly escape the hospital that they go to at the first opportunity, seemingly not trusting the doctors!), but that polemic is worn relatively lightly by the film and played for humour. Amusingly the only thing that Mostyn and Merv seem to do is take from others without giving anything back, such as the meal and lodgings, the hospital services, even the way they steal a couple of bikes when they don't have money to pay for a lift!

The teens on the other hand seem entirely uninterested by politics (suggesting living in a new apolitical world?) and aside from Spike and Rhian seemingly even art (suggesting the need for Eileen to arrive and pull the students back together for the art gallery visit, suggesting the importance of teachers, or at least mentors, for the way that they present opportunities and broaden the scope for their students, rather than simply just forcing appreciation), but have a much more individual experience of St Petersburg. Even the "jocks and princesses" students who seem to just be using the trip for fun and fooling around with each other rather than studying or learning about a different culture are not entirely presented as one dimensional: their relationships develop too and perhaps needed the breathing space for reflection that a school trip to another country represents to take stock of them.

Eileen eventually reaches her students just in time to take them around an art gallery and take in Rublev icons (as Spike says to Eileen: “removing the figure of Christ between the two icons is like removing the teacher….you have to learn for yourself”, which is a beautiful way of emphasising the theme running through all of the different subplots of the film) as well as doing some analysis of other paintings in the icon tradition, where every element stands for something and is there to be interpreted.

The other big plot is Spike coming to terms with his homosexuality and attraction to the Russian artist that the group meets. While this is a little broad, I did really like the way that the goth girl Rhian was characterised as being the perfect girlfriend figure in the early sections only for her to realise that Spike was not interested in that way. I liked that she is allowed to react angrily to him, feeling hurt at that rejection. In some ways Rhian is the most touching figure of the film, perhaps because while the film doesn’t give her as much screen time to her pain as it does to Spike finding himself, it does allow her to have a number of lingering yearning shots. None better than in the scene where Spike leaves the group to join the Russian artist’s gang to party on the other side of the bridge (making a definitive move towards his needs) and while the bridge lifts up to cut him off from Eileen and the teens, we get a long moment of Rhian looking back at the rising bridge before the other teens comfort her.

There is the sense that the deus ex machina separation of the students and teachers created the best circumstances for everyone (except perhaps Mostyn and Merv, though they get the chance to patch things up too in the end!). The students got the freedom to explore a new city and find themselves. Eileen herself got to show some determination in asserting herself enough to push away from the over controlling guys in her life for a while (significantly hitching a ride into St Petersburg with a woman of her own age who is both divorced and running a little capitalist business buying plastic flowers in Berlin and shipping them over to Russia to sell at a profit!) in order to reach her students. And on reaching them she is able to both do a bit of sensitive teaching in the art gallery scene, something that might have been more difficult with the two guys around! She can also let Spike go, comfort Rhian and deal with some of the issues that the other students are having too, suggesting that she is a teacher sensitive to the needs of her students more than just wanting to punish them for misbehaving while they were on their own (which say Mostyn was already doing even in his very first scenes with Spike).

I’d love this to get out to a wider audience. It’s a nice, unpretentious light ensemble drama with a lot of very touching performances. Some of it is a bit broad and cheesy (the terrible dancing on the bridge!), but that is overpowered by its earnestness and generosity to all of its characters (even Mostyn and Merv aren’t shown as entirely unsympathetic and the bullying students at the start end up coming around somewhat and respecting both Spike and Rhian in the end). But this is a film that doesn’t really get screened much in the UK let alone internationally (though maybe it has turned up since 1997 on Channel 4’s Welsh language station S4C, who funded the film?). It seems to have had one, long deleted UK VHS release, and nothing on DVD even in the UK (I’m working from my recorded from TV copy still). I’d guess that this is probably down to the Welsh language aspect as much as anything. But that should be as much of a novelty as the chance to see a rural side of Russia that normally doesn’t appear in films!

It is slightly strange to re-view this film now in an era of Putin and reported homophobia in Russia, and see this film's presentation of St Petersburg as a place where artistic freedoms are being celebrated almost as another form of enterpreneurship - a place where alternative lifestyles are out in the open and holding impromptu fancy dress balls at midnight on bridges! St Petersburg is presented as a liberation for Spike from his repressive (even destructive, given the film alludes to a relationship with a gay schoolmate who committed suicide, with Spike being thrown out of his family home when his connection to his dead friend came to light) Welsh small town, and it is obvious that he has prepared a lot more for the trip than his classmates did, being the only one with the ability to speak and understand Russian. However this subplot doesn't exactly arise purely from Russian specificities in this section: this coming out story of feeling liberated and seizing the opportunity for a new life could really be put into any setting of a visitor to a foreign country becoming seduced by it (it's morphed into a Best Exotic Marigold Hotel-idea at the moment!), but while it is the major one, it is only one of a number of subplots in this ensemble piece, so its not too big of an issue! I'm not entirely sure that any individual one of these subplots would be strong enough to sustain an entire film on their own, but the way that all of them interact with the ideas from one flowing into and enriching the others is quite beautifully done.

Anyway, this is probably my favourite 'school trip' film, capturing a bit of that sense of the excitement of travel and tourism (it also bears some similarities to the David Lean film Summertime/Summer Madness: holiday romances and the film bookended by a train trip to and from the city) and a slight sense of liberation from the norms of everyday life. Athough I remember my own school trip to France in the mid-90s was nowhere near as eventful and life changing as the one on display here!
Last edited by colinr0380 on Wed Jun 10, 2015 4:17 am, edited 2 times in total.

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life_boy
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Re: 1990s List Discussion and Suggestions

#361 Post by life_boy » Sun May 31, 2015 4:10 pm

I contributed nothing to this thread, despite having the opposite intention. I didn't get in nearly as many viewings as I was hoping either. Hopefully I can add something to the 00s conversation.

51) Presumed Innocent (Alan J. Pakula, 1990)
52) Mission: Impossible (Brian De Palma, 1996)
53) Dick Tracy (Warren Beatty, 1990)
54) Mo’ Better Blues (Spike Lee, 1990)
55) Die Hard 2 (Renny Harlin, 1990)
56) Time Indefinite (Ross McElwee, 1993)
57) Life and Nothing More… (Abbas Kiarostami, 1991)
58) Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze, 1999)
59) Three Kings (David O. Russell, 1999)
60) The Remains of the Day (James Ivory, 1993)

Total films watched for the project: 80
First-time viewings for project: 37
Re-watches for project: 43
Films watched for project that made final list: 3
Films re-watched for project that rose significantly in appreciation: 8
Directors with multiple movies on list: 9 (all with 2 films)
Films with Razzie nominations for Worst Picture: 2
Anticipated Number of Orphans/Also-Rans: 30
Finally made it around to watching Satantango: No

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Re: 1990s List Discussion and Suggestions

#362 Post by thirtyframesasecond » Sun May 31, 2015 4:22 pm

I'm reading Satantango but didn't get around the seeing it. I wouldn't even know how to approach a seven hour movie. How many sittings does it take?

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Re: 1990s List Discussion and Suggestions

#363 Post by TMDaines » Sun May 31, 2015 5:16 pm

One or two.

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domino harvey
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Re: 1990s List Discussion and Suggestions

#364 Post by domino harvey » Sun May 31, 2015 5:18 pm

I watched it in one sitting, mainly because I knew if I ever stopped for more than a bathroom break or disc change I probably wouldn't bother to finish it

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TMDaines
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Re: 1990s List Discussion and Suggestions

#365 Post by TMDaines » Sun May 31, 2015 5:28 pm

I felt compelled to finish it only to be able to make a fair judgement on it.

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domino harvey
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Re: 1990s List Discussion and Suggestions

#366 Post by domino harvey » Sun May 31, 2015 5:29 pm

That's the only reason I get through so so many of these movies I subject myself to out of curiosity

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Re: 1990s List Discussion and Suggestions

#367 Post by Tommaso » Sun May 31, 2015 5:55 pm

I wanted to spread it over three evenings, but ended up with only two because I was utterly compelled by it. Which doesn't necessarily mean I love it.

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Re: 1990s List Discussion and Suggestions

#368 Post by Shrew » Sun May 31, 2015 6:57 pm

I did actually get around to watching Satantango this time (over 3 nights), but its potential spot on my list was already taken by Cool as Ice.

US- 20
China- 6
France- 6
UK- 5
Hong Kong- 3
Belgium-2
Taiwan- 2
Japan- 1
Iran- 1
New Zealand- 1
Sweden- 1
Denmark- 1
Spain- 1

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Re: 1990s List Discussion and Suggestions

#369 Post by John Cope » Sun May 31, 2015 7:25 pm

The funny thing about Satantango is that I've only seen it a couple of times (once at Facets in Chicago and then later on a fairly crummy bootleg DVD) and have had the UK DVD release sitting on my shelf unopened since it was released in '06.

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Gregory
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Re: 1990s List Discussion and Suggestions

#370 Post by Gregory » Sun May 31, 2015 7:48 pm

I voted for it last round but dropped it this time just because I couldn't specifically remember why I had considered it one of the fifty best films of the decade, and there was no way I'd have had time to do another single-sitting viewing of it. I suppose there wouldn't have been anything wrong with breaking it up into two or three viewings, considering its multipart nonchronological structure, but the first time I was determined to experience it all at one go. Revisiting it didn't really feel like something I was looking forward to; it would have felt more like something I "should" do and get out of the way, and I didn't like going about it that way. Maybe I'll feel differently when more time has passed.

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Re: 1990s List Discussion and Suggestions

#371 Post by ohtani's jacket » Sun May 31, 2015 11:37 pm

thirtyframesasecond wrote:I'm reading Satantango but didn't get around the seeing it. I wouldn't even know how to approach a seven hour movie. How many sittings does it take?
I watched it 30 minutes at a time spread out over a couple of weeks.

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A
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Re: 1990s List Discussion and Suggestions

#372 Post by A » Mon Jun 01, 2015 2:13 am

Walked out on it at the cinema after 3 hours, cause I felt I had better things to do that day.
Haven't tried it again.

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Re: 1990s List Discussion and Suggestions

#373 Post by thirtyframesasecond » Mon Jun 01, 2015 3:53 am

I made a very very very last minute change to my list, which I hope was accepted. If so, then my country breakdown (and I'll pick the first or main country of a co-production) reads:

US: 10
France: 6
UK: 5
China: 4
Iran: 4
Canada: 2
Serbia: 2
Taiwan: 2
Argentina: 1
Australia: 1
Austria: 1
Finland: 1
Germany: 1
Hong Kong: 1
India: 1
Japan: 1
Mexico: 1
New Zealand: 1
Poland: 1
Russia: 1
South Korea: 1
Spain: 1
Sri Lanka: 1

Where you think it's obvious that one film from a country means that country's most well known director, then it probably is!

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NABOB OF NOWHERE
Joined: Thu Sep 01, 2005 12:30 pm
Location: Brandywine River

Re: 1990s List Discussion and Suggestions

#374 Post by NABOB OF NOWHERE » Mon Jun 01, 2015 4:22 am

thirtyframesasecond wrote:I'm reading Satantango but didn't get around the seeing it. I wouldn't even know how to approach a seven hour movie. How many sittings does it take?
Just one if you fall asleep.

Noiradelic
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2009 12:45 am

Re: 1990s List Discussion and Suggestions

#375 Post by Noiradelic » Mon Jun 01, 2015 4:28 am

I watched it for this list. Intended to view it over 3 days, but technical problems streaming it to my TV and other issues caused me to watch it over 4 -- at least 3 were consecutive!

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