The 1993 Mini-List

[swo17]

ELIGIBLE TITLES FOR 1993

VOTE THROUGH MAY 31

Please post in this thread if you think anything needs to change about the list of eligible titles.

[therewillbeblus]

Can you please add

Butterfly & Sword (Michael Mak)
Run and Kill (Billy Tang)

[swo17]

Added!

[Lowry_Sam]

Can you please add Tales Of The City/Alastair Reid?

[swo17]

Done

[yoshimori]

Not sure whether such things count on these lists, but one of my favorite 1993 ?cinematic works" is Bill Viola's "Tiny Deaths" - a four-screen thing I saw at the Tate Modern ten-ish years ago. If it is added, I'd vote for it.

Hmm. Is it possible my favorite 1993 film, Sonatine, will top the forum's list? I'm probably way off.

And while I'm at it, I'll highly recommend the rarely seen Resnais adaption of Smoking / No Smoking. Not sure how one might access it, but ...

[swo17]

Bill Viola's "Tiny Deaths"

Eligible and added. Wish I could see it!

[scotty2]

Some add requests:

Bodies, Rest and Motion (Michael Steinberg)
Heaven and Earth (Oliver Stone)
Mazeppa (Bartabas)
Sugar Hill (Leon Ichaso)
Wide Sargasso Sea (John Duigan)

[TechnicolorAcid]

I’d like to request “There’s Good Weather in Deribasovskaya, Or It’s Raining Again in Brighton Beach”

[swo17]

All added, though I put the Ichaso film in 1994 (only an unceremonious festival screening in 1993) and the Gaidai in 1992 (you still have until the morning to vote for it!) given evidence that it premiered 30 Oct 1992

[knives]

I’ve had a pretty fun time with my viewings so far. Thankfully it seems ‘92 was the exception.

First up, and not yet on the list, is Miike’s excellent DTV actioner Bodyguard Kiba. Researching this one I found out Miike’s series is based on the same comic as an earlier series starring Sonny Chiba. As to the film proper, it’s really good. A lot of these early Miike films kind of go through the motions, but this one has two big elements that push it past its more rote components. Firstly, the expected make bonding stuff just works really well. Script wise it hits all the expected beats, but the actors really sell their slow bonding in a way I was just taken by.

Secondly, the way Miike presents the girlfriend and all the troubles she has encountered sees a unique degree of characterization for a female characters in one of these movies. Really her role here in a lesser movie would be an excuse for cruel unpleasantries, but the film tells rather than fully showing her story with her as storyteller. Leaving us at her discretion is great and it allows Miike to film her scenes with an abandon that the rest of the film doesn’t contain. It’s a good hint at the kind of filmmaker he would become as the decade progressed.

Another off list one is Susan Seidelman’s Oscar nominated short The Dutch Master. It’s not as salacious as I assumed. Instead it has a lot in common with The Shape of Water for how it uses reception as a form of characterization with sexuality as the way we experience this characterization.

Finally is Arizona Dream, where I wasn’t expecting much because Kusturica in Hollywood just sounds like the worst idea possible. He’s such a culturally specific filmmaker that even without considering the scrubbing of style that should have happened I doubted he could have understood America. Fortunately he more than beat expectations. Kusturica really shows an understanding of America with the enclave of Arizona being so distant from the metropolis of hidden New York. Even the humour which I feared would have the hardest time transitioning over works really well as the quirks are so well tied to feelings and emotions like longing and emptiness. There’s a depth that remains.

[swo17]

I've added those two films that were missing

[knives]

I’d really like to hear Colin’s thoughts on The Cement Garden which seems like the kind of film he’d illuminate perfectly. As is my stray impression is that Birkin’s vision at first appears DOA juvenilia, b it the comedically overwrought sexuality reveals itself as an appropriate basis for a deeper look into structures of identity both communal and individual. I especially found the gender politics interesting as the two leads become the same person as well as the transgender like subplot.

Also, between this and Lemon Incest it’s any wonder that Charlotte Gainsbourg is a normal person. Also, based on the last two adaptations I’ve seen Ian McEwan must be write some real weird books. Wouldn’t have guessed that based on Atonement. guess I have to check out the other adaptation from this year.

[geoffcowgill]

Also, based on the last two adaptations I’ve seen Ian McEwan must be write some real weird books. Wouldn’t have guessed that based on Atonement. guess I have to check out the other adaptation from this year.

Wait until someone tries to make a film of Nutshell.

[Lowry_Sam]

Some more adds:

Indian Summer
Grumpy Old Men

[knives]

Also, based on the last two adaptations I’ve seen Ian McEwan must be write some real weird books. Wouldn’t have guessed that based on Atonement. guess I have to check out the other adaptation from this year.

Wait until someone tries to make a film of Nutshell.

I guess I have to add it to my summer reading list.

This year is proving real fruitful as beautifully illustrated by these two UK (adjacent) films.

First and most simply gratifying was The Secret Garden. Holland and crew really breath a new life into this most Pickfordian of stories. It’s gorgeously shot by Deakins who alone gives this a unique language, but also the script and editing revel in the harshness of the world in a way that feels so real and makes the escape of the garden come across as true to the imaginations of such small children as can be. I was thinking of Blue Velvet of all things when spring blossoms and they see the robin feeding. It’s not the same though as Holland views it as the joy of the real blood and bones rather than the evil of the good.

Much more harsh and all the more beautiful for it was Derek Jarman’s Wittgenstein which I’ll admit I viewed through a rather autobiographical lens as a pean to what changed for him philosophically following his diagnosis and a mirror to the intense physicality of Blue which is likely my number one vote. This reminded me intensely of Davies’ Benediction which I suppose makes sense as another final narrative by a great British artist. There’s a certain plainness to late Jarman that allows the emotional effect to come to the end of the film with a kind of shocking emptiness at first. This is a kind of extreme of that as Wittgenstein starts as a humourous and satirical take on being before falling into an abyss of doubt as truths fall away with not even falsities to preserve a sense of self. A lie can be a thing so at least it provides a source of substance even if it is a bad one, but nothing dries the bones.

[therewillbeblus]

I adore that Jarman. My thoughts from going through the BFI set:

But it's with Wittgenstein that Jarman elevates his skills to a territory I wasn't aware he had ever ventured. By taking a mostly organically humorless script and filming it with invention as farce to the greatest hits of philosophers and philosophy itself as a practice (and, even more whittled down, just the absurdity of human behavior in general as it relates to attempts at definition via intelligentsia) without being pejorative or condescending, he demonstrates an audacity and creativity around conceptual flexibility that is unparalleled. Frankly it's one of the most original and exciting artistic projects I've seen in a long time.

[swo17]

Some more adds:

Indian Summer
Grumpy Old Men

Done

[domino harvey]

I don’t think it will make my ballot but I like Indian Summer too. Fast forward a decade and Binder’s wonderful American Desplechin the Upside of Anger absolutely will though

[knives]

Two great ones coming up:

Dottie Gets Spanked
This isn’t anywhere as weird as I was expecting, but that’s to Haynes’ benefit as this is unquestionably his best intellectual pastiche film. Shot and told much like a CBS after school special slightly removed from the censors Dottie lays open some deep emotions in a largely quiet sphere. At times it plays out like a missing segment from Poison, but it is also separate for how it’s really Haynes first time moving away for metaphor or construct into pure unfiltered character.

Dangerous Game
I mistakenly assumed that Dangerous Game was going to be a gangland adaptation of The Most Dangerous Gane. This is instead a pretty early entry in Ferrari’s experimental narrative as tone poem exercise and as a result features a couple of things that don’t quite work like the family stuff after the first scene. They halt the momentum on what is otherwise a very stressful look into the artistic process purely from a director’s perspective (I feel that often movies about the process are thought through the writer’s process). Throughout the film is running on vibes and I suspect how much one gel’s to the mood of the film which is like a slow tempo hot jazz determines how much a person is going to like this.

The disconnect-reconnect of the horrifying on screen violence (brought to life perfectly by Madonna of all people) to the friendly orchestrator attempting to keep things together is heart racing in a way that communicates some real depth without feeling like punishing the audience. I was recently watching Black Venus and it was truly unpleasant to live in that film spewing hate at the audience for trying to engage with it. By contrast Ferrara and St. John have developed a story that pains and caused me to think about my role as an audience member without ever feeling like the film thought I was a villain. Instead the crew seems to want the spectator to be a collaborator in making a healthy artistic experience.

[colinr0380]

I’d really like to hear Colin’s thoughts on The Cement Garden which seems like the kind of film he’d illuminate perfectly. As is my stray impression is that Birkin’s vision at first appears DOA juvenilia, b it the comedically overwrought sexuality reveals itself as an appropriate basis for a deeper look into structures of identity both communal and individual. I especially found the gender politics interesting as the two leads become the same person as well as the transgender like subplot.

Also, between this and Lemon Incest it’s any wonder that Charlotte Gainsbourg is a normal person. Also, based on the last two adaptations I’ve seen Ian McEwan must be write some real weird books. Wouldn’t have guessed that based on Atonement. guess I have to check out the other adaptation from this year.

Thanks knives, although I have not seen The Cement Garden since a mid-90s television screening so my memory is hazy at the moment and I will have to seek it out and give it another watch! If you are wanting more 'weird' McEwan there is that 2005 adaptation of Enduring Love in which Rhys Ifans obsessively stalks Daniel Craig after an unorthodox meet-cute during a runaway ballooning accident! That's directed by Roger Michell who previously worked with Ifans in Notting Hill and Craig just beforehand in The Mother, so he's combining his actors together there! And I assume the other adaptation you mention is Macaulay Culkin's attempt to escape from his cute kid persona by terrorising Elijah Wood in The Good Son, which was written by McEwan! As that trailer suggests, that's also getting into the whole 'stuck in a dreadful moral dilemma' area that characterises most of McEwan's work.

On Dangerous Game, I think it is flawed but interesting. Mostly flawed in that I agree with Todd In The Shadows (NSFW) that to really have an emotional impact it really should have been Madonna's character's story, but instead it is much more about Keitel's abusive director pushing the male lead into acting out an abusive relationship for real for the verite aspect of it all. But interesting in that it is another Keitel collaboration just after Bad Lieutenant and for the whole meta-aspect of Keitel potentially just doing a version of Ferrara himself, turning the whole production into a weirdly disorienting hall of mirrors.

[knives]

Thwarted by time again. The other adaptation I was referring to is Conversation with a Cupboard Man though I’ve actually seen The Good Son, but remember it as not being particularly good. I guess that’s up for a rewatch.

An actual rewatch which just cemented once again how good a film it is was Mask of the Phantasm which is going to be my second Batman film in a row at number one which is all the more impressive as this year has some steep competition. Timm and Radomski didn’t make a film necessarily as ready to write about as Burton, but I’m left deeply touched by the melodrama. This is a surface quality old fashioned film all about the pain of being. It reminds me a lot of color ‘40s and ‘50s noirs like Slightly Scarlet for how uses these detective movie tropes to get at the being of their characters.

And boy in the character level is this impressive. No film or show has even presented Bruce Wayne so well. He’s genuinely the main character with every moment built to the audience’s understanding of what a terrible curse being Batman is. Nolan is the only other person who’s ever tried anything close to this, but it took his three (great) features to truly impress what this manages in under 80. This viewing in particular a moment which stood out was in a fight scene during a flashback that has Bruce does this punch which he’s clearly impressed by as his girlfriend watches in terror. This road is an abject failure and he needs to get off it if he ever wants to stay as Bruce. The late, great Kevin Conroy also gives some of his best work portraying this tortured, queer man with the earnestness of high quality Tennessee Williams. Some lines are etched into my mind forever such as his pleading to his dead parents to let him go which mirrors the light quality of Andrea’s conversations with her mother. I also noticed this time around how the structure allows Bruce to grow where in his youth he viewed the world as either/or; there’s no chance at happiness and catharsis which Batman explicitly provides over and over again. In the film’s present he’s shown growth by realizing life can work and that vengeance is something which never ends.

Another actor I want to give so much credit toward I almost don’t want to even mention as his reveal late into the film is so perfect. It was probably the first time I experienced real horror in a movie. Anyone who’s seen this knows exactly what I mean. So instead I just want to really praise Andrea Romano. If you liked any American cartoon from the ‘90-‘10s you already love her work. She’s typically explained only in terms of being a casting director, but she was also the main director of the actors so the high quality of performance her really needs to be attributed to her.

Appropriate for a noir melodrama this is also such an incredibly beautiful film which only makes the sense of loneliness and isolation stronger. Radomski designed some humongous sets which even when enclosed seem infinitely huge so that Timm’s characters don’t even feel contained by them rather floating through space apart and alone. There’s only two points where the characters feel close and they both have such intensity and horror to them I’m still left shaking afterward.

I know the idea of watching this, let alone taking it seriously as one of the best films of the year, is probably not something most will be thinking about, but I real hope that at least a few give it a try.

Plus, you have to appreciate any movie which opens with a Dick Miller cameo.

[therewillbeblus]

I’ve actually seen The Good Son, but remember it as not being particularly good.

The Good Son is not good, but if memory serves it does copy the ending to Tim Burton's Batman, so that's something

[the preacher]

Can you please add Ron Maxwell's Gettysburg, Mrinal Sen's Antareen and Dariush Mehrjui's Sara? And the short Schwarzfahrer (Black Rider) won 1 Oscar and is not bad either.

[swo17]

All added, thanks!