Yep - lists. The internet's overflowing with them. "8 Best Pie Flavors from Central America"...you get the idea. But a discussion of notable films from the 90's came up years ago among future 'smoke writers (back in what is now being referred to as "the myspace days"), and we wanted to bring that discussion back. All five participants - John Cribbs, Christopher Funderburg, Ian Loffill, Marcus Pinn and Stu Steimer - were asked to come up with their 75 favorite movies from that long-ago decade: the results were then calculated into one master list of 50. Each film will be written about over the next five weeks as we draw out this self-indulgent entry into the endless abyss of movie lists, classed up thanks to contributions from some of our favorite film writers.

{CLICK HERE FOR #'s 41 - 50}
{CLICK HERE FOR #'S 36 - 40}
{CLICK HERE FOR #'S 31 - 35}
{CLICK HERE FOR #'S 26 - 30}
{CLICK HERE FOR #'S 21 - 25}
{CLICK HERE FOR #'S 16 - 20}
{CLICK HERE FOR #'S 11 - 15}

~ by christopher funderburg ~

Edward Yang's intimate epic is an oddity in the digital era. It might the last of the "hard to see" masterpieces: at a time when virtually anything can be found for sale online with relative ease and films of all stripes are being rescued from purgatory by a variety of companies dedicated to film preservation, A Brighter Summer Day remains difficult to track down and actually lay your eyes on. Few films as universally adored and critically lauded have languished so inexplicable into the modern day; it used to be that you had to take Halliwell's word for it that a film scarcely available on vhs was an all-time great, but few films with the stature of Yang's can't now be ordered up after a brief bit of web-browsing. Its imdb message boards are dedicated almost exclusively to which shady sites are offering cruddy digital copies - knowing that the excellent World Cinema Foundation restored the movie in 2009 and created a new print makes such dubious digital offerings even more inadequate. As for seeing that new 35mm print, good luck: it costs a movie theater $1,500 to rent it for a single screening, so it's rare to find a movie theater willing to engage in that sort of money-losing charity. (And don't forget the cost of international shipping on 237 minutes worth heavy celluloid.) I had the good fortune of seeing it in May introduced by Apichatpong Weerasethakul as part of a series at the Jacob Burns Film Center he curated and I suspect most screenings of the film occur under similar exceptional circumstances. Hopefully, the frequently announced, never materializing dvd release will finally get a date and render this opening paragraph moot, but Yang's reputation as filmmaker has undoubtedly been affected by the lack of access to his films (not just ABSD - let me know if you ever happen upon Mahjong or Terrorizers, incidentally) with the obscurity of his work making it feel a part with the output of his challenging not-for-everybody Taiwanese brethren Tsai Ming-liang and Hou Hsaio-hsien. In reality, Yang's warm, humanistic film couldn't be further from the oblique, willful artsy-ness of those filmmakers. You'd be forgiven for thinking that sitting through a four-hour Taiwanese epic might be a bit of chore - in truth, it's an absolute breeze. I guarantee you'll be engrossed in the unpredictable, shocking, funny, heart-breaking world created by Yang. Even though it's about gang violence and a wrenching jealousy-fueled murder, ABSD exudes an inviting energy and openness - it's an immersive experience you'll be happy to dive right into.

The novelistic story follows a high school student in the 60's recently located with his family to Taipei to escape the Communist government ruling mainland China. Most of the descriptions of the film focus on the final scene, a murder based on a true incident that Yang heard of when he was a young teenager, but describing ABSD in terms of its endpoint seems incredibly strange, if only because the scene comes as a result of a minor late film twist and feels almost tacked on, like a final ineffectual whimper following swirling howls of teen angst and socio-political anxiety. Yang's original title for the film - The Murder Incident of the Boy on Guling Street - doesn't help the confusion about what ABSD is really about and I suppose no synopsis could really tackle all of the elements of such a multifaceted artwork, but don't go into it thinking it will mainly be about a Murder Incident. Honestly, if we're going to focus on murders in ABSD, it would be much more fun to talk about the shocking gang ambush that leaves one group fighting for their lives in the silhouetted darkness against a horde of samurai sword-wielding assassins? I'm assuming that would get your attention more than a soured love story and a broken teenage heart. Ah, who am I kidding? Part of what makes ABSD such a spectacular and special film is the way it attempts to capture so many elements of human existence, from puppy love to political injustice to family life to spiritual transformation to institutional indifference to Elvis Presley. This is not just the story of a young man trying to find a new identity after being uprooted from his homeland and planted Taipei, looking to the brotherhood of gang life to the joy of being in a rock n' roll band to falling for a first love to befriending the un-fuck-with-able son of a military commander. This is also the story of a father trying not to buckle under torture at the hands of his government, a girl discovering herself through exploring the men in her world, a gang leader's transformation from a tough-talking hoodlum to a pensive lover of Tolstoy, a family fearing for their future and not knowing what their lives will hold. To reduce ABSD to any one strand not only gives a false impression of what it means to experience it (I swear an hour goes by at one point without the love story even being mentioned), but mischaracterizes the uniqueness of Yang's vision. His special ability as filmmaker is to create films that hold all of life in them at once, entire worlds that sprawl and meander with the uncertainty and randomness of life, to create minor epiphanies that fracture into wild ramifications and earth-shattering events that end up meaning nothing in the grand scheme.

It would be difficult to speculate on a precise meaning to Yang's work in general and A Brighter Summer Day in specific, apart from the notion that life is a knot of separate stories that tangle together to make a person who they are. In some very real, pure way, ABSD is better than a philosophy; it is an expression of life, a carefully structured world containing all of the wisdom and foolishness of our own, a picture of a life, a picture of many lives that draws to a close with a shocking death, a death no less shocking for thoroughly knowing the world in which it occurred. There's a cosmic meaninglessness, a depravity of randomness to the lives of so many characters in the film. Dead ends and false starts struggle to fit themselves in the story of an Incident on Guling Street, fragments of emotions and desires find wrong-headed outlets and fail to crystalize into distinct feelings. But Yang's work miraculously scorns all nihilism: there's a deep sympathy here to the pain and confusion of simply existing. The main character aptly attends school at night and most of A Brighter Summer Day is ironically shrouded in darkness; Yang's vision of Taipei in the 60's requires the uncertainty and blackness of perpetual night. Yang's character wander through the darkness, never quite settling into their world and the main student can never exactly find himself, every identity he which attempts to don fits him poorly and in the end, the perpetual darkness of his world consumes him. Yang loves his characters, he fears for them, he doesn't want for the darkness to overtake them - and many do find some small summer day in which to exist. But he understands that kind of stability isn't a cinch and he understands too well, with too much sympathy, the awful actions his lost souls can take. He understands the unfortunate end that those who stand too close to those lost souls can suffer. But this is too warm and funny and human a film to end the discussion of it on a down note. If you look at it from too wide a perspective, you'll miss the genius of Yang. This is a film that encourages you to listen carefully to the small notes, to steep in the bits and pieces and minutiae: a teenage gang member's striking falsetto Elvis impersonation, an argument between brother and sister, an unexpected discussion of swordsman novels and Napoleon's assassin in War and Peace. Like life, if you concentrate too much on the big picture, you'll miss all the little things that make it worth experiencing. It's easy to underrate the joy of the unexpected, the beauty of a trumped-up emotion, exhilaration of barreling towards a dead-end. A Brighter Summer Day is a film so small it had to be huge.

~ by stu steimer ~

Every single year I deceive myself into watching the White House Correspondents dinner because I keep thinking that perhaps this will be the year where the president succumbs to the inner-adolescence that brews in the heart of every male, up from the trenches of astute professionalism the facade crumbles under the assault of deadpan analingus jokes that crystallize with the audience like a hospital power generator in a kid's pool party. It never happens. Instead of Redd Foxx we get Fred Sanford, safe quips about Donald Trump's comb-over set to the musical stylings of Mark Russell that keep even the bawdiest and rowdiest of NPR donators firmly cemented in their place, choking with hearty laughter on the eternal vanilla fog.

I don't know what it is, but I have such a weakness for the presence of obscene and jarring dinner conversation/speeches that I go so far as to try to work it into my personal life. It's why I don't have any friends. You can only lead off with grace so many times over Thanksgiving dinner before your affections for "felch-queens" causes a stir. In my case, one is the magic number. It should come as no surprise that this too is my weakness when it comes to cinema. I consider it the universal saving grace for film. I have reached a point, unfortunately, where I just don't have the patience for much, and I usually now end up shutting the television off somewhere around the 30 minute mark on most movies, choosing to stare at my blank, barren walls in a deadening emotionless stupor instead. But if you put a character in a dinner jacket and let him spill his guts about his experiences in barbiturate abuse in front of a crowd of astute scholarly gentleman and women, I will be forever indebted to your feature - no matter how uninteresting the rest of the picture is, or how irritated I have become whilst watching it up to that point. No real solid reason for why this is - it isn't even like it is that funny, but I just can't help it, or explain it.

So for an entire film to revolve heavily around this...well, it is what the magic of film-making is all about of course!

I don't feel right denigrating the film, spinning it in a way to accommodate my juvenile/warped definition of humor, but at the same time I can not completely dismiss it as being entirely brooding in tone, even when the subject matter deals heavily with suicide, child molestation and incestuous rape. Those of course are lacking in humor, but the juxtaposition of uncomfortable irony that fills the dining hall after a son - Christian - announces to the entire reception that his father, the guest of honor celebrating his sixtieth birthday party, was the sexual attacker of himself and his siblings in childhood is absolutely palpable, the delivery so contained and matter-of-fact that it is exceptionally difficult to watch with stagnant passivity; most will anyways, I was too busy googling for fake nudes of Salman Rushdie on my iPhone - didn't find any (but I hear that scene is really great!)

The guests sit around wearing masks of obvious unease, shock takes hold, the jovialty melds into a deafening wave of silence. The strained wearisome faces of both the victims and attacker validates everything without further detail needed. Guests are forced to stay at the party, their car keys physically confiscated. Attendants are encouraged to continue drinking and they do so, pretending to ignore everything they have just heard or at least try to go with the view that Christian is insane, his comments the result of instability and duress; a person not thinking clearly. By the time Christian makes his second speech, accusing his father's continuous abusive relationship with his children as being a major contributing factor to his daughter's recent suicide, all confirmation is aired beyond suspicion. This is something that has been brewing and festering in this character for decades, far beyond the graces of emotional venting.

Some may accuse one of finding humor in this as being slightly crass, but there's a certain realist-gallows absurdity that sets a slow burn in the audience; to those on screen it's a kindle to a thirty-foot long fuse that follows characters from room to room as they carefully sidestep the burning wick, ignoring the warhead in the corner of the dining hall, and the pungent smell of almonds rising from the guests' wineglasses. After the first confrontation, when the victim suffers the vilification from his peers, that he is ruining his father's birthday, some of the guests become like those in Poe's Masque of the Red Death, forcing the fears into an empty room, locking and barricading the doors and returning to the party, believing the disease to be neutralized and lost in the shadows even as the blood begins to surface through the pores. Viewing it as an observation of dysfunction and social mores it is far meaner and less playful than what many may come to define satire as, but it is also strikingly honest and real. Like Cassavetes' Faces, the grotesqueness of some of these characters and their interactions - the reluctance to accept the humility of monsters, the diversions of burdening conflicts - lies the paradoxical crux. The Celebration is often uncomfortable, often times it feels completely bleak, but it never goes so far as to alienate. The humor is always there - and not of a cheap comic relief factor that takes the form of golf balls being rocketed into a man's nuts every 20 minutes - natural and presented with textured subtlety completely void of callous cynicism, an ugly thing that often paints the downfall of far too many dark comedies. The Celebration rides down that path between comedy and tragedy, maneuvering itself with delicate precision without loosing control, never getting lost in the extremes of either territory, driving with absolute focus.

~ by ian loffill ~

David Cronenberg once stated that his influences as a filmmaker are literary - writers like William S. Burroughs and Vladimir Nabokov - rather than cinematic. Film was a growing curiosity of his rather than the obsession of so many others of his generation. Although his early features are still remarkable they are somewhat uneven. He had found his voice as a writer slightly before that as a director. In the latter role he would grow to more successfully realise his ideas in the 1980s from Videodrome onwards. The man certainly doesn't shy away from a challenge when it comes to material. Crash itself was preceded by his versions of Naked Lunch and M. Butterfly. Most recently he has taken on Don DeLillo's novel Cosmopolis, which is confined to the inside of a stretch limo for much of its length. It could be that the challenges that the material presents are what really invigorate Cronenberg. In some ways, Cronenberg's version of The Dead Zone improves on Stephen King's story but is faithful to the overall tone of the book. Perhaps he equates a good read with a good film or feels that nothing is unfilmable. I've always disliked the mindset that views cinema as inherently inferior to literature and Cronenberg is one of the finest practitioners of print to film adaptations. The two forms can be more complimentary than people realise and Crash is a perfect example of this. Even before he adapted William Burroughs with Naked Lunch, you could see the author's influence on his work and the same is true of the writer J.G. Ballard. Cronenberg's early feature Shivers has striking parallels with Ballard’s novel High Rise, which was published the same year (1975) that the film was released, so similarities between the two were clearly a coincidence. A line from Shivers that "even dying is an act of eroticism" wouldn't have been out of place in one of Ballard's novels. I wish that Cronenberg had also attempted the same author's contemporary urban Robinson Crusoe tale Concrete Island, but expecting him to match or top his feat with Crash is perhaps a bit unfair. As a fan of both men's work, it's one of those great fortuitous acts of fate that these two minds would meet in what is unquestionably for me one of the best films of the 1990's.

The author and filmmaker merge perfectly. Like the late, great Ballard, Cronenberg comes across as a mild mannered and articulate man with an extraordinary, anarchic imagination and very dry sense of humour. Both have a gift for suggesting other possible contemporary realities and making ordinary, everyday environments into a more bizarre, dangerous, exciting and exotic place. Ballard himself approved of transposing the story of Crash from Britain to North America, feeling it was even more appropriate in the land of the automobile. He also felt that the film went much further than the novel. It's interesting how well the themes of Crash tie in with the director's ongoing obsessions. Vaughn talks about "the reshaping of the human body by modern technology" - something that Videodrome, The Fly and eXistenZ also address. The idea of an individual becoming immersed in a dangerous underworld figures into Scanners and Eastern Promises. The strange mix of attraction, control and deception that develops between three people (James Spader's character - also named James Ballard - his wife and Vaughn in Crash) is a crucial element of Dead Ringers and A Dangerous Method. The director had already shared his enthusiasm for motor racing in the exploitation flick Fast Company and after seeing Crash it's hard not to notice the lovingly-filmed cars in works like A History of Violence and Cosmopolis. It's a film that you almost feel shouldn't work as well as it does. I think where Cronenberg succeeded was by taking a distant approach to these characters, even more than the novel did. Although Spader, in his element in these icy, perverse roles, is our central figure, like him we are coldly and curiously observing this group of crash victims' increasingly unusual and hazardous pursuits.

I'm still not entirely sure what it was that made Crash so controversial on release. There was of course the usual expression of outrage by our moral guardians. There was also audience expectations. Sex and car crashes are usually pretty good selling points for a movie, so maybe audiences were puzzled or unnerved or felt cheated by seeing a group of people who are aroused by wounds and crash test dummy videos. I think it's possibly true that most filmgoers like to know exactly where they stand with a film. Is Crash trying to shock, disturb, amuse, enlighten, thrill, astound, confuse or any other number of things? I think its greatest strength is that it's an incredibly provocative film that you are not entirely sure how to respond to. It remains a highly unsettling, confounding and beguiling work. It's also quite pleasing (and ironic) that one of the most divisive of modern films should be a source of consensus here. Without wanting to sound too self-congratulatory about this whole series, you know you're in good company when a collective poll like this scores a high place for a film like Crash.

~ by marcus pinn ~

I'm well aware that the 80's, as well as the past decade, had its fair share of romantic comedies about love triangles and single ladies trying to score a date, but the number of those movies in the 90's was just ridiculous. You all know the kind of movies I'm talking about. Movie Trailer Voiceover: "This...is Tammy. She's single, livin' in the big city and works in a big office building. She's getting back out there in the dating world, BUT she's about to find [sound effect of a needle scratching across a record] that dating...isn't all that it's cracked up to be." Thankfully, American independent dark comedies were on the rise in the 90's as well with films like Happiness, Henry Fool, Election, Citizen Ruth, Spanking The Monkey, Your Friends & Neighbors (another movie directed by Neil Labute) and many more. Actually some of those dark comedies bordered on being sad twisted dramas. Neil Labute's In the Company of Men is the perfect example of this: a movie that starts off as a dark comedy that slowly turns in to a sad, depressing drama by the end. I don't know if part of Labute's motivation for making his feature film debut was his cynicism and jadedness towards the ridiculous amount of romantic comedies that were out during the time of In the Company of Men, but it wouldn't surprise me if it did. I mean, the basic plot of In the Company of Men could easily sound like those generic romantic comedies that I just described: This...is Christine. She's deaf, lonely, has few or no friends, keeps to herself at work (where people mock her behind her back), lives alone with her mother and probably hasn't had a romantic relationship in years, if she ever had one at all. But suddenly, she's being pursued by two co-workers, Chad and Howard, at the same time. But what Christine doesn't know is that Chad, a sociopathic, woman-hating, alpha white male) and Howard, a submissive, nerdy pushover who's just broken up with his wife and has a ton of aggression towards women at the moment, are not only best friends: they're playing a cruel joke on Christine by pretending to like her because they hate women and Christine is the perfect vulnerable slow-moving target for them to take out all their unchecked aggression on. Now Christine finds herself in the middle of what she thinks is a love triangle, but in reality she's about to find out she's the butt of quite possibly the cruelest joke ever played on anyone...ever. Sounds screwed up, I know.

In the Company of Men is a lot more than simply a middle finger to wacky romantic comedies of the 90's. It's a look in to the world of angry, misogynistic white men (specifically angry white men in the office/work environment) that are just angry for no legitimate reason. When I think of movies like Falling Down, I kind of laugh to myself because on some level Michael Douglas' problems aren't that serious. Ok, he lost his job and he's divorced. But chances are he'll bounce back on his feet at some point. Just about any other demographic (women, homosexuals, people of color, etc.) would have a way more tough time trying to get back on their feet had they been in the same position as our "hero" in Falling Down. All the scenes from In the Company of Men where we see Chad, played by Aaron Eckhart in an Academy Award-worthy performance, sitting around a meeting table angrily gossiping and just talking shit with his fellow white male co-workers are a lot more profound than people realize. The more you watch those scenes, the more you start to see that those types of people are fucked up and have no real reason to be upset in life. This is dangerous for someone like me, because I have my fair share of experience working around people like this, so a movie like In the Company of Men only fuels my own aggression towards angry white alpha males who have no reason to be angry. This movie is also about trust and how easily vulnerable and desperate people can place their trust in the wrong person. While movies like Faces, Blue Valentine and Flannel Pajamas make marriage seem like the scariest shit ever, In the Company makes dating and having a relationship seem scary and you almost have a hard time trusting anyone after watching it (especially if you're a woman.)

Like any good dark comedy, Labute crafts hilariously absurd scenes of stuff we really shouldn't be laughing at like a deaf woman's voice being mocked (more than once) or subtle racism in the workplace. The misogynistic aspect of In the Company of Men is so heavy that people fail to see the racism. There's a scene in the movie that I always feels goes unnoticed where a room full of nothing but white co-workers are sitting around laughing before a meeting. Then one of the black co-workers walks in the room and things suddenly go quiet and awkward for a second. I always felt it was pretty obvious what that moment was all about. But apparently not...

Actually my one and only gripe with In the Company of Men (other than the fact that it's a brilliant film made by the same person who went on to sell out and direct bad remakes of The Wicker Man and Death At A Funeral) is Neil Labute shying away from the racism in the film. Obviously I'm not saying the movie or Labute are racist, but on the dvd commentary track Labute shoots down any notion of the film's characters being racist, specifically the scene where Aaron Eckhart makes a black intern pull his pants down and expose his testicles. It seems like dominant figures like Spike Lee (who had one of biggest mouths in the 90's) made some white directors scared to show racism for fear they they'd be mislabeled as racist. Coming from personal experience (and common sense), wherever there's angry, frustrated, white businessmen in the workplace not only will there be misogyny, but there's also gonna be some racism. But at the same time I understand if Neil Labute didn't want to overshadow the film with the racism angle. Labute late went on to direct the racially charged Lakeview Terrace, which was a huge joke.

Labute's debut also shows the pointlessness of office work and how depressing it can be. Office Space is often credited as the comedy to show the boring and sad yet funny side of working in an office cubicle, but In the Company of Men kind of did that a year before Office Space even came out.

~ by marcus pinn ~

I've never been a big believer in the so-called "sophomore jinx" when it comes to the world of cinema. Sure there's been a few examples over time that could prove this theory to be true. but at the same time you have sophomore works like Safe, Trust, Drugstore Cowboy, Pulp Fiction, Days Of Being Wild and Rushmore, Wes Anderson's dark yet quirky romantic comedy about a love triangle between precocious 15-year-old playwright Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman), depressed millionaire Herman Blume (played by Bill Murray in one of his greatest performances) and kindergarten teacher Rosemary Cross (Olivia Williams.) Rushmore is a film about everything from infidelity (Herman Blume's relationship with Ms. Cross) and losing a loved one (Max's mother and Cross' husband) to that "first crush" we can all relate too. It's also about a friendship between two unlikely people, a high school teenager and a middle-aged millionaire, that blurs the line between father-figure and friend. In my opinion, the relationship between Max Fischer and Herman Blume is the best thing about Rushmore. Within the first ten minutes of the film when Herman Blume meets Max, it's obvious he's fascinated and likes him very much (just before the opening montage, Blume smirks with admiration upon hearing that Max is one of the worst students at Rushmore Academy.) Max and Herman first meet after Herman delivers a speech at Rushmore - his sons both attend the school - about "taking down the rich boys." Right off the bat it's clear that the one thing they both have in common is that they come from working class backgrounds, yet are surrounded by spoiled well-off rich people and can't relate to the circles they belong to. It's as if Blume was speaking directly to Max in his speech. Herman, who's some type of self-made millionaire in the construction business, doesn't fit in at family gatherings, mostly consisting of his wife and kids' rich friends. Max, the son of a barber (although he tells people his father is a neurologist) isn't rich like his fellow Rushmore classmates, doesn't get good grades, and only has one real friend who's much younger than him. Actually the only reason Max is even known on the Rushmore campus is because of his involvement in just about every single extracurricular activity or club the school offers. So the two outcasts form a bond. Herman looks out for Max, offers him a job and even mentors Max after he's kicked out of Rushmore and has to attend public school. But things eventually turn sour after they both fall for the same woman: Ms. Cross. Suddenly Max and Herman's friendship turns in to an ugly rivalry that gets way out of hand. Next thing we know the police, killer bees and even family members are all pulled in to their little war of love.

In just two films, Anderson was able to find his signature style of classic 60's (mostly British) pop-rock mixed with mature quirkiness, that plucky/string heavy Mark Mothersbaugh score, ridiculous yet somehow believable scenarios and those tight, carefully-crafted shots usually showing something semi-important going on in the background: notice how there's that one little Rushmore academy kid intentionally placed in the background of almost half the shots in the film. It even carved a nice little niche in late 90's pop culture when MTV used some of the cast members from the film to do Rushmore-style vignettes for the MTV Movie Awards. Although Anderson gained some notoriety for his first feature Bottle Rocket (a special MTV Movie Award and praise from Martin Scorsese), it was Rushmore that put him on the map.

Rushmore also introduced the world to Jason Schwartzman (apparently Schwartzman was cast after his cousin, Sofia Coppola, recommended him to Anderson.) His performance was so unique and defining that no matter what other movie he's been in since, you still kind of think of Max Fischer (at least I do.) Max is just as funny as he is complex. On one hand you have a mature, although sometimes very transparent, teenager who writes and directs his own original plays about everything from Vietnam to gang violence, is able to get an aquarium built at his school, knows how to carry himself around adults three times his age and doesn't exactly speak like your average teen. Then on the other hand, you have a vulnerable young boy who cries his eyes out after being expelled from school, daydreams, is shy and awkward around girls his own age, freezes up when it comes to something sexual (the scene where Ms. Cross calls his bluff by offering him a handjob) and doesn't get good grades. Max's Rushmore uniform and third act green suit are also part of a long list of signature outfits that partially define Anderson characters such as Diginan’s yellow jumpsuit in Bottle Rocket, Chaz's red jogging suit in Royal Tenenbaums, Team Zissou's yellow hats, etc. While baby boomers have Easy Rider and Two Lane Blacktop, and Generation X has everything from Clerks to Slacker, Rushmore, in my opinion, is one of the defining movies of Generation Y, mainly because of Max's character. Naturally there are some unbelievable qualities about Max, but overall he is a representation of that quirky, awkward, daydreaming, misunderstood, somewhat lonely yet talented teenager. Personally, I was close to Max's age when this film came out, which is why I consider it to be part of my generation (Y). In fact, realistic portrayals of awkward youth can be found all throughout the 90's in films like Ratcatcher, Welcome To The Dollhouse (another important Generation Y film), Nenette & Boni, U.S. Go Home, etc.

Naturally, Bill Murray was a big draw as well. Some people credit Rushmore as the film that not only gave his career a second wind, but also introduced him to the world of indie/arthouse films. Now when it comes to Bill's transition from Hollywood to the indie/art house world, you could credit Anderson for playing a major part in that. With the exception of Garfield and Charlie's Angels, in the last 15 years Murray's name has become synonymous with names like Jim Jarmusch, Sofia Coppola and Wes Anderson (Murray has appeared in every Anderson movie since Rushmore.) But prior to Rushmore's 1998 release, it felt like Murray was slowly dipping his foot into roles that you wouldn't necessarily expect to see him play like Wild Things (97) and even Ed Wood (94.) But it's understandable to forget that given Murray's last two major movies before Rushmore were The Man Who Knew Too Little and Larger Than Life. Rushmore is very much a Wes Anderson-style comedy and Murray's performance is a little tamer than it was in something like Caddyshack or Scrooged, but Anderson still allowed Murray to be himself, highlighted in scenes where he aggressively swats away a basketball from a little kid or awkwardly sprinting away after delivering a message to Ms. Cross.

Even if you've grown tired of Anderson's shtick (thanks to recent stuff like Life Aquatic and Darjeeling Limited) or were never a fan of his to begin with, this is the one Anderson film that you really can't hate and was one of the key independent films of the 90's that broke through to the mainstream.

~ by ian loffill ~

While it got decent reviews, Miami Blues would underperform at the box office on its release and I think it's fair to assume that it found more fans on video and television than it did on the big screen. This was somewhat ahead of its time, as offbeat crime movies would prove to be a mainstay of nineties cinema, whether it was Red Rock West, Pulp Fiction, Bottle Rocket or Palookaville. It's alternately funny, unpredictable, tense, exciting and violent but is one of those curious films that never really found the wider audience it deserved. For some of its participants it has unfortunately been relegated to a relatively minor footnote in their careers. It seems a bit unfair that Jennifer Jason Leigh is better known for something like Single White Female than this. It was an early sign that Alec Baldwin wasn't suited to conventional leading man status. Although perfectly adequate in films like The Hunt for Red October and The Getaway, they undermine his versatility. His gifts as an actor really shine through in roles like this, The Cooler and Glengarry Glen Ross. Fred Ward, who was also an executive producer on the film, was never a typical Hollywood star either but had something of a vintage year in 1990 with a run of starring roles in this, Tremors and Henry and June.

More than twenty years later, Miami Blues remains ripe for rediscovery. I think the film's semi-obscure status is partly down to the low profile of writer-director George Armitage, who has to date given us only two more features in the years since. It wouldn't surprise me if there was some Poltergeist/Thing from Another World-type rumour circulating that the producer was actually the real director and nominal director Armitage took the credit. There are some surface similarities to producer Jonathan Demme's two previous films, Something Wild and Married to the Mob (which also featured Baldwin.) The film was shot by Demme's regular director of photography Tak Fujimoto and Demme stalwart Charles Napier makes an always-welcome appearance. Even the fondness for small character parts (Obba Babatunde as the blind police informant Blink, Paul Gleason's corrupt police Sergeant) shows an affinity with Demme's work. Whereas Demme has a very observational style, Armitage (a sort of would-be auteur) seems altogether more interested in what makes his characters tick. He's made only a handful of films over a span of decades, many of which are difficult to get hold of. He might not need the work or only does films when it suits him, but it's hard to believe that this and the more popular Grosse Pointe Blank didn't lead to other offers or potential projects given his deft handling of the material and his ability to get the best out of his cast.

This is a good film to round off the list for me. Far more than any other period in film history, I had to dig a bit deeper to find the highlights of the nineties and this was one such case. I did much of my groundwork for becoming a film buff in the 1990's, but it was the films of yesteryear that I enjoyed much more at that point. An interest in contemporary film came later on, and while trying to figure out what were the truly worthwhile films of this period the very origins of this poll emerged online in an online thread. Many of the suggestions made for "the best films of the 90's" were completely new to me, but Miami Blues was one like Gremlins 2 that I was aware of but had never gotten around to watching. This was around the time I switched from checking out films that I had read about in books to the internet becoming my main source of prospective viewing. I doubt I have any nostalgia for the nineties or much affinity with the films the decade produced, so I can judge the films of this era pretty objectively. It's still difficult to say what defined cinema in the 1990's, from what I've seen there was no exciting individual talent on the same level as Godard in the sixties or Fassbinder in the seventies. There were big successes like Jurassic Park and Titanic, but I don't think we got a new cultural phenomenon from cinema that was on the same level as something like James Bond or Star Wars. Was there a picture in that decade as monumental as Intolerance or Andrei Rublev? Not that I'm aware of. By and large, I have stronger memories from that time of the films that disappointed (Sleepy Hollow, The Phantom Menace, Eyes Wide Shut and The Thin Red Line spring to mind) rather than the ones I enjoyed. A good reason why lists of this kind are handy and why cinema is such an interesting art form to explore is coming across gems like this. If Miami Blues is an indication of the kind of 90's films that are underappreciated and deserve a bigger following, then I certainly hope that much of the real treasure of this period is still out there waiting to be found.

~ by john cribbs ~

"I think I'm changing my style, but I'm just writing with different ink." - Chabrol

By the time he cast her in La cérémonie, Claude Chabrol had led Isabelle Huppert to the guillotine twice: she managed to circumvent her fate in one movie, but wasn't so lucky in the next. In both cases, the path to her own personal ceremony - "ceremony" being an old French gangster's term for execution via guillotine - is forged from Huppert's resentful sense of injustice, leading to a renouncement of responsibility and resulting in a subsequent death for which Huppert is prosecuted. That the poisoning of Violette's father is intentional while the death caused by Story of Women's Marie an accidental consequence of her negligence, yet Violette's epilogue saves its conniving heroine and Story's condemns the misguided Marie (both films are loosely based on real people whose sentencing took place in pre- and post-war France, respectively) says a lot about late-period Chabrol's own sense of justice. When Huppert took over for Stéphane Audran* as the director's most reliable leading lady, she reinvented the Chabrol heroine - previously best characterized as a noble, suffering victim - as headstrong yet bratty, clever yet immature, adventurous yet impulsive (it's appropriate that Huppert was introduced to the Charol universe attempting to murder Audran in Violette Nozière.) Huppert set the tone for the director's best work in the latter half of his career, in which he celebrated women's essential independence while revealing the horrible (and often humorous) effects of their misguided (and often homicidal) rebellions. Whereas Audran was so often left hapless by her character's male counterparts, her successors targeted their oppressors: hence Cry of the Owl's Mathilda May or The Bridesmaid's Laura Smet turning the tables on would-be stalkers, or Marie Trintignant's Betty and her very different way of dealing with the attack by her estranged husband's rich family than Audran inLa rupture. Stumbling a little moving into the decade with the unfortunate Dr. M/Club Extinction and underwhelming Madam Bovary adaptation, Chabrol soon found his stride and peaked in the middle of the 90's with his ultimate tale of women lashing out against their perceived oppressors, which he jokingly referred to as "the last Marxist film."

In La cérémonie, the crimes of Huppert's two earlier Charbol characters - patricide (specifically the father, possibly the most tormented and/or doomed figure in all of Chabrol's films) and infanticide (how the law regarded Marie's termination of pregnancies) - are respectively attached to the background of Sophie and Jeanne, and once again the father's death is strongly suggested to have been intentional while the child's, like the death of Marie's patient in Story of Women, accidental. Sandrine Bonnaire's Sophie has managed to escape prosecution and gossip regarding her father's demise in a fire, remaining solitary and withdrawn,** while Huppert's postmistress Jeanne responds to what she sees as unspoken communal judgment against her by being the town's most impertinent flibbertigibbet following the suspicious death of her child. Perhaps because of their shared past of suspected murder, the two women form an almost instant bond, like two mischievous schoolgirls who meet in detention, laughing away what other people may think of them and their alleged criminal acts: where's the proof, anyway? They wordlessly validate each other's actions while sharing an unimpeachable sense of righteousness over everyone around them, not least of all the wealthy family for whom Sophie works as a maid.

One of the most popular and erroneous claims made of Chabrol's work is that he satirizes the sheltered bourgeoisie, but that's not something he's all that interested in. What he cares about more are how the less-fortunate perceive those who are well-off, not only in stature but in confidence and social graces. Jacqueline Bisset's Catherine Lelievre and her family aren't bad people; they're very supportive and loving of each other. If they're somewhat aloof and inherently ridiculous, it's only the way that satisfied people who live in a big house naturally behave. They're guilty of the occasional thoughtless moment, most notably when daughter Melinda, having generously pulled over to help Jeanne fix her car, tosses the oily rag back in Jeanne's face: to Jeanne, it's worse than a slap. Suddenly, it's not a gesture of kindness on Melinda's part but a contemptuous chance to display her superiority over Jeanne. Moments like these create ripples on the surface of an orderly household as Chabrol explores the relationship of master and servant. While the Lelievres act appropriately and even over-friendly towards Sophie, it's a decency that's almost intrusive, forced upon, meant as a reminder of who's in charge so that offers to help her learn to drive, to take her into town and finally to teach her to read and write just become, in Sophie's mind, more orders meant to demonstrate their authority over her. For their part, the Lelievres want to pretend their paid servant is happy in her work, that she isn't being exploited - smile dammit! We're being nice to you! Don't just do what we tell you, be our little pal and confidant! The relationship is based on unavoidable dehumanization and personal invasion, although as it progresses it starts to occur on both sides as Sophie, prompted by Jeanne, becomes a spy within the household. "Class war will always exist for the lower class," Chabrol stated, and naturally the war must end with guns and bloodshed. What besides the chaos of destruction could be the result of a film so stringently centered around rituals: a job interview, a tour of the house, a birthday party, ordering groceries, sorting through donations for the poor and, ultimately, a mock repetition of the opening tour that culminates with murder. The ceremony itself is repeated, as the murderers find themselves as quickly and shockingly condemned as their victims, in an epilogue that suggests the only real equality these characters will find is in death.

Most of the New Wavers were still very active by the 90's. Truffaut, Franju and Demy had already passed away, but Rohmer managed to begin and complete his Tales of the Four Seasons cycle (and even snuck another film or two in there as well.) The always-prolific Godard averaged one movie each year, including his massive 8-part video project Histoire(s) du cinéma. Varda made two documentaries about Demy, then one other film before sitting out the second half of the decade. Resnais offered the ambitious and weird Smoking/No Smoking and Same Old Story; Rivette mounted the production and release of the interminable La Belle Noiseuse, then did four more that I've never heard mentioned anywhere by anybody (three of them starring Sandrine Bonnaire.) Louis Malle, hot off late 80's international successes, did Damage and Vanya on 42nd Street before dying of cancer in 1995, the year La cérémonie came out. For his part, Chabrol released eight, at least three of them essential installments to his sizable filmography, of which La cérémonie is the clear masterpiece.

* Audran does make an uncredited cameo in La cérémonie, in a clip from Clabrol's Wedding in Blood that plays on the same TV the family will be slaughtered in front of at the end of the film.

** Just recently I wrote a summary of this film for [redacted]; I literally spent hours trying to think of a good adjective to describe Sophie. "Withdrawn" was the best I could come up with.

~ by christopher funderburg ~

Billy Budd, the Herman Melville novella on which Claire Denis' masterpiece is based, revolves around two central elements: man's natural hatred/jealousy of physical beauty and the injustice inherent in bureaucratic systems. It is the story of a sergeant at arms who hates a beautiful sailor and the neutral bureaucrat who perpetrates an injustice by sticking to the letter of the law. Aside from moving the story from its original setting to the contemporary French Foreign Legion in Djibouti, Denis places almost all of her emphasis on the first part of the equation (the power, the sheer force of physical beauty) and all but ignores the second. Billy Budd loops around Melville's typical concerns about the dehumanizing nature of bureaucracy; just as much of his original tale is devoted to the mechanism of Budd's punishment as the initial conflict with his Master-at-Arms Claggart that leads to the execution. Captain Vere, the bureaucrat charged with meting punishment, matters to the story more than Budd himself; in Beau Travail, you could be forgiven for failing to remember if the character has even been included (he hasn't.) Denis has taken "the power of physical beauty" as her subject and explores every facet of the concept, not just the negative responses it provokes - she is interested in the overwhelming intensity it inspires, both awed and spiteful. Her camera crawls over the shirtless, sweaty, perfectly formed bodies of the young legionnaires, both wary and seduced by the mysteries of those bodies' power. It is a heightened, sumptuous take expanding on Melville's theme, an essentially cinematic exploration of beauty's irresistible power and the misery it can provoke in those in its throes. Denis' camera perches a strange placidity on the edge of a void, coolly contemplating whether to launch itself into total oblivion, whether to submit to the revery that those writhing, languid, tawny bodies exude with a natural force: this is the story of toned, tawny bodies and chiseled jaws as forces of nature. These physical forms are in no way out of place amidst the crags and shorelines and oceans against which they are set - if anything, the majesty of the surrounding mountains struggles to pull our attention away from striking contrast of Billy Budd stand-in Gregoire Colin's soft sensitive features and rippling abs.

What Denis has faithfully retained is the simple, almost primal, elegance of the original story - Melville's work rarely contains much in the way of plot, the real show being his ornate language in service of his surprising iconoclasm and the vigorous clarity of his ideas. Melville gets labelled a "cynic" and, sure, I suppose that's fair. But Melville has a real love for his most difficult characters, his most morally gnarled creations. Hopelessly broken men like Bartleby, Pierre and Captain Ahab aren't objects of derision or pity to Melville: his portraits of these men are laced with sympathy - he doesn't want you to hate them or fear ending up like them, but to understand them and the environments with which they clash. Denis has this trait in common with Melville - she perhaps takes it even further in films like I Can't Sleep and Trouble Every Day where vicious killers, self-pitying victimizers are treated with tenderness and compassion. In fact, the downplaying of a true villain in Beau Travail, her decision to eschew an infuriating human embodiment of institutional injustice, represents this tendency for a Melville-like generosity towards moral ambiguity and rotten souls. Denis Lavant plays the Claggart role in her version of the tale and he takes over the narrative in a way that the original character never does; he possesses the film as an average man who appears almost deformed in contrast with Colin. Naturally, as with the original character, he's motivated by a hatred of the physical perfection that oppresses him, tormented by the insistent landscape of male sex-power around him - his torments would be easy enough to label as "homoerotic" if his reaction weren't far more complex than that. Many reviewers attempt to reduce both Melville's story and Denis' film to a story of repressed homosexual desire, but that's far duller than what either artist is actually expressing. Beauty's power is transcendental, awe-inspiring well beyond mundane, earthly concerns like sexual impulse. It exceeds rationality, short-circuits our biological systems and then shoves a mirror in our face and forces us to contemplate our own short-comings, our own imperfections. Beauty's evil is the way in which it reduces Lavant to his pock-marked cheeks, inexpressive hooded eyes and bony arms. A beautiful man is in harmony with the universe, an expansion of the landscape, at one with nature's Godliness. An ugly man will be forever warped by his inadequacy, unable to find total peace, in ceaseless conflict with nature's majesty.

The sheer brilliance of Beau Travail's aesthetics can't be over-stated; it is likely the most gorgeous film ever made. Along with frequent collaborators cinematographer Agnes Godard and editor Nell Quettier, Denis has out of thematic necessity created a film of sheer, sublime beauty. It is a dazzling, miraculous thing to behold. Denis' most bold decision is to film the legionnaires and their exercise regimens as dance pieces, their movements and forms pointedly recalling dancers' movements, their fluid gestures swaying with the music from Benjamin Britten's Billy Budd opera. It is an abstract ballet of military men set against a back-drop of Africa's most harsh and unforgiving landscapes. Most poignantly, Denis ends the film on a more literal dance sequence, a leaping and manic solo number performed by Lavant memorable for its shocking grace and agility, a transformative performance that suddenly finds Lavant every bit as physically engaging and impressive as his peers. Despite likely being a symbolic representation of a suicide, Denis presents it as a moment of hope amidst desperation: it is a moment revealing hidden beauty, unexpected beauty, spontaneous beauty; Lavant's movements have an improvised, explosive quality that feels as though his melancholy gambol is rushing fourth from some unknown source, his grace the result of an internal combustion that can find no other release. It is in moments like Lavant's performance that Beau Travail severs itself entirely from Melville's story, so original and shocking is its realization of the physical truth of Melville's observations. It exceeds Melville's enduring, invaluable artwork to become its own enduring, essential fantasia of lean bodies, elegant motion and dark blues seas crashing into rusty red cliffs; it is the word made flesh, the flesh made celluloid. A transfiguration of abstraction into being. Melville has always been characterized a cold and cynical writer, that his work could be retained with a measure of faith and turned into a film like Beau Travail proves that description is somewhat off the mark. Denis has always been a poet, a sculptor of impressionistic montages - Beau Travail is the film where she silences any critical voice doubting there is a rigorous, analytical mind of which the poetry works in service. Before Beau Travail, who could have guessed Melville and Denis are mirrors of each other: the poet of white men in Africa (and black men in Paris) and the dark philosopher of the open seas. Melville called his work "the great art of Telling the Truth" and Denis' camera finds brutal, intoxicating truths in the void of beauty and desperation.

~ by stu steimer ~

A friend of mine once described Johnny, the haggard and aged 27-year-old transient scumbag from Mike Leigh's Naked, as the character every male in their late and aimless 20's imagines they are after killing off a few pounders. It usually happens around that time when the window to confidence and clarity begins to crack, where all your anxieties and insecurities that followed you into the tavern at the beginning of the night get swept away in the breeze and you start to feel like a stronger man, an intellectually advanced superior of the human race, hovering above all these drunkards and gutter trash that strolled in under the veil of night to discuss platitudes that are so infuriatingly tedious and insignificant that you have no choice but to get the hell out of that place as fast as you can, your ego is soaring and everyone is dragging in the mud behind you like an anchor of cerebral dead weight. It's nearly two in the morning and the stench from the bar follows you out the door – a fine smoky mix of bitters and turpentine with all the sinking weary hopelessness that comes from another Tuesday night/Wednesday morning lost to the deluge of human drudgery. But never mind that because you feel more alive now than you have in months. This isn't the place for you. No one here is interested in anything remotely real and meaningful, they're swept up in their own goddamn pitiful distractions and devices. You start walking, frustrated that with all these people around no one is sharing your reality, hoping maybe you'll come across someone – one of the few not sleeping at this hour – that will actually be willing to enter a dialogue, a dialogue of something real. The last thing you think before blacking out is maybe one of these numbers etched onto this bathroom stall will lead you somewhere. Hours later your wallet's missing and whatever few words that you're able to slip past your lips are now completely indecipherable, if there's a complete sentence to be constructed in that cluttered mess of vowels and consonants there would be no point in trying to make sense of it, all of it the verbiage of a drunken idiot. Whatever. Even if you can't remember the night behind you, at least you are certain that you did something, that you experienced life and essence. You walk out of the fetid and dimly-lit space preparing for the blinding flood of light before finding yourself in the bar again, not even closing time: you find out later all you did was make a string of belligerent nonsensical hand gestures before falling asleep in your own piss and sweat. None of it even well-earned.

Having directed a good half dozen feature films and about twice as many teleplays, Mike Leigh had already had an impressive career going by the time Naked was released in 1993 and although the film follows a similar structure to his earlier work (heavily improvisational pieces regarding the British working class), the avenues that Naked travels down are significantly darker and more brooding than anything he's created before or since. There's no reason why one should care about Johnny; he's a condescending manipulator, a probable rapist and a leech off the society and people he has no real use or tolerance for, yet there is a certain fascination and understanding with the charismatic anti-hero of Leigh's film. Johnny's ranting and the pomposity exudes from his impromptu soapbox canon becomes justified when one takes into account the world they are up against. Johnny, though intellectually evolved without the benefit of a solid educational history, is not necessarily "smarter" than the strangers and acquaintances he meets as he drifts to and fro on his aimless Candide-like ventures through afterhours London – which includes members of all wakes of life and economic classes – but it is their willful ignorance and unquestioning pedantic abeyance that becomes so deeply frustrating to the character; exploding in esoteric rages about life, meaning, the universe becomes the only way to combat it as such.

I put Naked as my pick for the second best film of the 90's, but in fairness it really is the film of the 90's, and I don't say that to garner any shallow diplomacy. Mike Leigh described the film as essentially being about the end of the world, and in many ways it is exactly that. All unfounded fears of Millennialism aside, there is something unquestionably brooding about it all, not just with the film itself but with the entire paradigm of the modern western world.

It's 2012, months before the next great apocalyptic date (be it of Malachi or Quetzalcoatl.) I look out the window and I see that the sun in shining and the weather is a reasonably imperfect 53 degrees – a true rarity in Pittsburgh; the days that aren't flooded with ominous gray skies are marred with summer humidity so intense that the implementation of a straight razor to the skin becomes to the only source of absorbing air and ventilation. I believe in science and observation more than prophecy and numerology, and I see no forecasts of planetary collisions in the near future: gamma ray bursts are unlikely though not impossible. Yet even with all of this relative security that the world will somehow go on past the new year, beyond the 13th bak'tun, I have never felt more dread. I suppose much of it is based on my innate pessimism – a trait I have never felt entirely proud of – but there always feels to be something dark and brooding lying in the folds of the horizon. The interconnected-cum-isolationist swill, and the increasing lack of patience of everyone around me (I can't think of the last movie I saw in theaters that wasn't accompanied by people fucking talking at any point of there being a few seconds of silence on the screen) have made me a very frustrated young man. Maybe I just need to drink more. Or get a response on casual encounters.

~ by john cribbs ~

A "safe" choice for the #1 slot? It might seem so: in a lot of ways, Todd Haynes' movie represented the peak of the Amerindie moment that made up a bulk of us budding film enthusiasts' formative years. Although it's a film from the same school as the Van Sants and set the stage for the Solondzes, [safe] isn't hindered by its indie tag, being just as firmly planted in the worlds of Douglas Sirk and Stanley Kubrick and Fassbinder* by route of Red Desert (in other words, it has something for everyone who ever liked a movie.) And speaking of red, Haynes' first collaboration with muse Julianne Moore** is hardly far from heaven: casting her as the delicately wilting Carol White was one of many impeccable moves on the director's part. Everything about the film, from its intricately textured script to its meticulous shot compositions, is as perfect as anyone could hope for...but at the same time, there's really nothing safe about [safe]. For a movie that's so carefully and elegantly stated, it's been laden with a plethora of interpretations over the years, tagged as an allegory for AIDS, a disease-of-the-week movie about the dangers of chemical exposure, a criticism of consumerist lifestyles and the hypocrisy of New Age healing centers. You could say the movie has been subjected to the same kind of oppressive scrutiny as its heroine's unexplained illness, audiences as naturally demanding of answers as Carol's supportive yet befuddled friends and family members, frustrated physicians and psychologists inclined towards easy explanations, or as quick to provide them as a self-help guru with "incredibly vast" perspectives. And like the various evaluations as to what's wrong with Carol, there's a certain validity to almost any reading of the film...even though most of them are largely wrong. It's funny to think that a lot of people love the movie without necessarily agreeing what it's about, but the fact that it's constructed precisely towards that purpose is part of the reason why we at the Pink Smoke have concurred that it's close enough to perfect to be considered the best film of its respective decade.

So why do some people find the film confusing or have such misguided ideas about it? Probably because it's centered around a confused person with misguided ideas about her own life. [safe]*** is set solely and firmly in Carol's world, any audience confusion is her own. The open space surrounding her is suffocating; it would be tempting to call her agoraphobic, if any diagnostic label could be attached, but the point is that her telling symptoms are contradictory to any simple analysis. Those kinds of contradictions are what make up the movie: the character's threatening secure environment, its ample yet invasive expansions, tight framing that would feel confining if it wasn't catching Carol in rare moments of control and self-assuredness. Like the final scene, not ambiguous as it's often suggested, but a way to end the film on a stasis that's both horrifying and beautiful at the same time (only differing interpretations make the scene ambiguous.) Carol herself, physically feeble, is one solid contradiction: she lives in a big house filled with paid help and brand new furniture, she has lots of largely vapid friends and a successful husband, with everything in its right place but it's not the glaring superficiality on display that's causing her to spasm and hemorrhage blood. It's something more elusive and interior, a biological appraisal of her own self-worth where she's beginning to sense that nothing and nobody around her has anything to do with her. Everywhere and at all times, there's the reminder that she is out of sync with the fabric of the world; nothing belongs to her or fits her, new haircuts don't help and wedding photos seem like pictures of strangers. But because she's compelled to blame herself for her own displacement, the illness reveals itself as a crippling fear of imperfection: entering a room to find the wrong couches have been delivered draws the kind of reaction more befitting the discovery of a gruesome crime scene. From that point on she's an open wound, and it's only natural that any other environmental imbalance would unhinge her so that she see threats coming around every corner. Car fumes suddenly become noxious gases. She walks into a dry cleaners to find it taken over by menacing spacemen in masks. Her only slightly-altered routine at the beauty salon ends in blood. Allergic to the conditions of her own life, traumatized by the everyday existence of people and things that are overwhelmingly anomalous, but convinced she's the problem - that like the couches, she "doesn't go with anything" - Carol begins to crave sterility and isolation.

Does Carol realize what's happening to her? Of course not: it's easier and more comfortable to identify the illness and seek treatment, ignoring the suggestion that it may actually be a disease with a purpose, even a liberating one. That might seem like a funny way to characterize an illness that brings about violent seizures, but for Carol to suppress the disease is to ignore the natural signs that something in her life is wrong. Instead of bringing her to a better understanding of herself, the potentially redeeming disease is subjected to another impediment - the cure. The last thing Carol needs is another man telling her why she's sick and what she should do about it, and while Haynes doesn't really paint the retreat at Wrenwood as hypocritical (it's not exploitive to charge money for a service people think they need; if anything, he suggests that institutions are no more duplicitous than the patients themselves) he sticks to the idea of the things we surround ourselves with to feel safe that are in fact threatening, whether it's a flashy house or hermetically sealed igloo. Carol's cure isn't change, it's acceptance: taking responsibility for something that isn't her fault, to destroy the feeling of detachment and discomfort, but only to the extent where she doesn't have to feel guilty about her own inability to change. She's desperate to get back to an existence where she doesn't have to worry about her own problems, to get back on course on a life with no real promise or future - by refuting the illness, she's crying for normalcy. By showing Carol being coached on how to be normal, like there's some surefire instruction manual, Haynes expands on themes from Superstar and Poison, not just disease and infection as viral warning signs against harmful lifestyles but the cure as denial. Another contradiction in his films is a contrast of the positive with the negative, such as image and self-torture in Superstar, homosexuality and criminality/sex and disease/liberation and murder in Poison...in [safe], the disease has positive aspects while the cure presents hindering negatives, always stalking about in the background like Lester, a Frankenstein's monster of insularity. Carol's disease becomes her addiction, her identity, who she is - why cure it when there's so much personality to be cultivated from suffering? Not to suggest that it's all in her head, as her husband and doctors would like to believe, only rather than a product of chemicals or fabrics or dog hair or "the 20th century," it's a reaction to the cluttered, empty space around people who seem to have it all figured out, moving naturally from one step to another like there's a map laid out in front of them. The only way Carol begins to feel important, or that anything has to do with her, is by disappearing entirely within her disease ("The only person who can make you get sick is you, right?") Even at Wrenwood, she battles this need with the similarly unconscious need to give away control and let others determine what's best for Carol in a controlled environment dedicated to wellness and health. The more she buys into herself as a sick person desperate to see herself "more as I am," the further away she is from realizing that this is what she's become.

* I'm thinking specifically of Fear of Fear, although Carol also exhibits some of Martha's latent masochism.

** Moore's other two movies from 1995? Chris Columbus' Nine Months and Richard Donner's Assassins.

*** Do I feel silly including the brackets in the title? Hell no, it's arguably the most appropriate use of syntax applied to a 90's movie title...definitely more effective than the slash in Face/Off.

BE SURE TO CHECK OUT OUR UPCOMING WRAP-UP OF THE INDIVIDUAL BALLOTS & EACH CONTRIBUTOR'S THOUGHTS ON THE LIST...