World of Shareware - Software Farm 2/wosw_2.zip/wosw_2/GENERAL/BEST1991.ZIP/BEST1991.TXT

Text File | 1992-05-20 | 16KB | 245 lines

THE TOP 10 FILMS OF 1991
 by Roger Ebert
        The Best 10 Movies of 1991:

1. "JFK"
        For sheer gall and raw filmmaking skill, if for no  other reason, Oliver
Stone's audacious reopening of the  Kennedy assassination was the year's best
film. Attacks on  its accuracy are beside the point; it is a rabble-rouser
designed to shock audiences into agreeing with Stone and  many others that
Kennedy may have been the victim of a  conspiracy. In an incredible three hours
of words and  pictures, Stone never says exactly who he thinks killed  Kennedy,
but he makes a persuasive case for the theory that  it could not have been Lee
Harvey Oswald, acting alone.
        The movie is a technical marvel; an automatic Oscar  should be voted to
Joe Hutshing and Pietro Scalia, who  edited its rush of images. And another one
should go to Joe  Pesci, whose supporting performance as a conspirator is a
case study in nerves. Kevin Costner supplies the sound,  trustworthy center to
the film, as New Orleans D.A. Jim  Garrison. Stone's critics said Costner makes
Garrison seem  heroic when actually he was a much more controversial  character.
But Stone isn't making an autobiography; he uses  Garrison more as a device for
organizing his material.
        No matter what you think about the politics of "JFK,"  it's impossible
to deny the film's artistry, as it uses its  big canvas and enormous ambition to
re-create a turning  point in American history, a shocking death that seemed to
open the floodgates for so many tragic events to follow.

2. "Boyz N the Hood"
        The headlines from America's troubled inner cities so  often show only
the bad things that happen there, in images  that deny the humanity of the
citizens who live there. John  Singleton's film provides faces and lives, in its
story of a  black teen-ager (Cuba Gooding Jr.) whose father (Larry  Fishburne)
is determined he won't be claimed as a victim of  street violence. He and his
friends have steered clear, more  or less, of the gangs that operate in the
neighborhood. But  there is always the possibility that words will lead to
insults, that insults will lead to a need to "prove their  manhood," that with
guns everywhere, somebody will be shot  dead.
        The movie is a thoughtful, realistic look at a young  man's coming of
age, and also a human drama of rare power --  Academy Award material. Singleton
is a director who brings  together two attributes not always found in the same
film:  He has a subject, and he has a style. The film is not only  important,
but also a joy to watch because his camera is so  confident and he wins such
natural performances from his  actors.

3. "Beauty and the Beast"
        The new animated feature from the Walt Disney studios  recalls the
greatness of such past classics as "Snow White"  and "Pinocchio," and builds on
the breakthrough of last  year's "The Little Mermaid." This is animation at its
best,  with all of the freedom and visual excitement of characters  who are
liberated from the rules of time, space and gravity.  They dance about the
screen in wildly creative choreography.  And the screen musical -- which in its
live-action form  seems moribund -- gets new life here with the songs by  Howard
Ashman and Alan Menken.
        There seems to be some sentiment for nominating "Beauty  and the Beast"
as one of the year's best films. This would  be a tremendous boost for the
prestige of animated films,  which are always relegated to a sort of cinematic
ghetto,  even though so many people love them. What "Beauty and the  Beast"
proves, once again, is that animation can be as  funny, as thrilling and as
powerful as live-action, and  wildly creative on the visual level. When Disney
made his  first animated feature, "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,"  the great
Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein called it one of  the greatest films ever
made. He did not consider "cartoons"  to be fit only for children. Neither
should we.

4. "Grand Canyon"
        Lawrence Kasdan's new film, written with his wife, Meg,  tells the story
of a few big-city residents who take off  their blinders and look around at
their fellow men. The  movie stars Kevin Kline as a businessman who is rescued
from  a mugging by Danny Glover, and then makes a decision to get  to know
Glover (simply because he might be dead if it were  not for this man). His act
seems infectious; other people  arrive at turning points in their lives,
including his wife  (Mary McDonnell), who wants to adopt a baby; his friend
(Steve Martin), who gets shot and decides to stop making  violent films; and a
casual acquaintance at work (Alfre  Woodard), who gets fixed up with Glover and
decides it's the  best thing that's happened to her in years.
        The movie is partly about the brooding sense of  impending doom felt by
a lot of city dwellers; when Kline  gives his son a driving lesson, it's a scene
more terrifying  than the shoot-outs in a lot of action pictures. And yet
beneath the doom there is hope, and a sense of freedom.  Kasdan, whose credits
include "The Big Chill" and "The  Accidental Tourist," has dealt with death and
change before,  but never with such liberating optimism.

5. "My Father's Glory" and "My Mother's Castle"
        These two films by Yves Robert tell similar stories two  times, first as
the narrator remembers his father, then his  mother. The films are quiet and
warm, and creep up on you  with small moments of charm. At first they don't seem
to be  about much of anything. They meander. To a viewer accustomed  to the
machinery of plots, they play like a simple series of  episodes. Then the
episodes add up to a childhood. And by  the end of the second film, the entire
foundation for a life  has been re-created, in memories of the perfect days of
childhood. Of course the films are sentimental. Who would  want it any other
way?
        The films are based on the childhood of Marcel Pagnol,  the French
novelist and filmmaker whose twinned novels,  "Jean de Florette" and "Manon of
the Spring," were turned  into wonderful films a few years ago. The new movies
are  narrated by the hero, Marcel, as an adult. We see him as a  young man of 10
or 12. His father, Joseph, is a  schoolteacher in the city, and his mother,
Augustine, is a  paragon of domestic virtue. One summer they journey out to  the
hills of Provence to take a cottage and spend their  vacation. These hills are
to become the focus of Marcel's  most enduring love affair. He loves the trees
and the  grasses, the small birds and the eagle that nests high in a  crag, the
pathways up rock faces and the way that voices  carry from one side of a valley
to another. And it is there  that he begins to understand who his parents are,
and to  love them.

6. "A Woman's Tale"
        Here is a story of courage by the Australian filmmaker  Paul Cox, who
tells of the dying weeks in the life of an old  woman played with great and
particular humor and power by  Sheila Florance. She still lives with her canary
in her own  apartment, looks after old Billy, who lives next door and  gets
himself into trouble, and despairs of the landlord who  wants to evict her. She
has been assigned a visiting nurse,  and as she and the nurse become friends,
they share their  deepest thoughts, and we learn, yes, that old people think
about love and lust as much as young ones. The nurse is  having a love affair,
and the old lady cheers her on.
        All the time she knows she is dying, and she insists on  dying with
dignity in her own home. There is a poignant  undertone to the story, because
Sheila Florance was also  dying as the film was made (she passed away earlier in
1991)  and some days was too sick to film, although you would never  guess it
from this film. Florance won the Australian Academy  Award for her performance.
(The movie has opened for U.S.  Academy consideration in Los Angeles and New
York, and will  roll out nationally in February.)

7. "Life Is Sweet"
        The British director Mike Leigh has never made a film  that didn't place
on my annual Best 10 list, but there was  an enormous gap between his first,
"Bleak Moments," in 1972,  and his second, "High Hopes," in 1989. Although he
works  much on the British stage, his methods discourage film  financiers,
because he creates his films in collaboration  with the actors; together, over a
long period, they invent  their characters and dialogue in improvisations.
        With "Life Is Sweet," this method has produced a film  of great humor,
set in a London suburb, and involving a  couple and their twin daughters, who
are 20ish. One twin is  cheerful and sunny; the other is a gloomy, chain-smoking
depressive. The girls are always on each other's cases,  while the father dreams
of liberation through a mobile hot  dog wagon, and his wife also wants to
express herself more  fully. In ways as unpredictable as they seem natural,
these  characters reveal one surprise after another, in a film of  wit and
humanity.

8. "The Man in the Moon"
        In another year, with another ad campaign, this film  might have been a
box-office hit. But the studio didn't seem  to know what it had, and although
the film found and began  to build an audience, it was swept away by the
Christmas  releases. Try to find it. Directed by Robert Mulligan ("To  Kill a
Mockingbird"), it is a perfect marriage of tone and  mood, a poem about growing
up and learning life's lessons.
        The film takes place on a farm outside a small country  town in the
1950s. Two teen-age girls are being raised by  parents who are strict, but who
are also loving and good.  One of the girls, Dani, is 14 years old and has just
passed  uncertainly into young womanhood. Her sister, Maureen, is  about 17. On
hot summer nights they sleep on the screened-in  porch and have girl-talks, and
Dani laments that she will  never be as beautiful and popular as her sister. Of
course,  all kid sisters feel that way. But when they both get a  crush on the
boy who lives next door, fears become real.

9. "Thelma and Louise"
        This was one of the best-looking films of the year, a  celebration of
the American West and a return to the  tradition of the Road Movie. It stars
Susan Sarandon and  Geena Davis as two friends who live lives largely determined
by the will of men. One weekend they decide to drive away in  a big old T-Bird
and have some fun for a change. After Davis  is assaulted in a parking lot and
Sarandon kills her  assaulter, more or less unintentionally, the two women
become outlaws, and the movie is the story of how they  discover themselves
while trying to get lost on the  backroads of the Southwest.
        Directed by Ridley Scott, the movie is a reminder of  such other road
pictures as "Easy Rider," "Bonnie and Clyde"  and "Badlands." But its
wide-screen cinematography creates a  distinctive world of its own, and there
are scenes of great  power (as when a drifter coldly wins Davis' heart and
betrays it) and of poetry (Sarandon buys a cowboy hat from a  man, as if it
contains the mystique of his maleness).

10. "The Rapture"
        Michael Tolkin's film goes on my list for two reasons:  for sheer
heedless audacity, and for a great performance by  Mimi Rogers. This is one of
those rare films that is  specifically about religion, yet not "religious." It
is  about a swinger, played by Rogers, who engages in mate- swapping with her
boyfriend, and then endures long, boring  days as a telephone operator. Then
suddenly she undergoes a  spiritual conversion, is born again, and begins to
await the  imminent second coming of Jesus.
        Watching the film, following its logic, I began to fear  it would lose
nerve at the end, because this film can really  end in only one way, with the
world actually coming to an  end, and the Rogers character literally being taken
into  heaven. The movie did not disappoint me -- but it did  surprise me,
because the film is not only about faith, but  also about pride, and it is based
on the belief that when  God created humankind, he provided us with the freedom
to  make up our own minds, whatever the consequences.

        The next 10 of the year's best films, alphabetically,  were:
        "An Angel at My Table," Jane Campion's extraordinary  biography of
Australian writer Janet Frame, who survived a  wrongful diagnosis as a
schizophrenic to become a successful  writer; Michael Field's "Bright Angel," in
a way a companion  piece to "Drugstore Cowboy," with Dermot Mulroney as the
teen-age son of a failing marriage, who meets a young woman  (Lili Taylor) and
joins her in an odyssey to help her jailed  brother; Barry Levinson's "Bugsy,"
with its wonderful  performances by Warren Beatty and Annette Bening as a
starstruck gangster and his moneystruck mistress; Kenneth  Branagh's "Dead
Again," a thriller in the Hitchcock  tradition, with the sins of the past
overshadowing the sins  of the present; Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper's
startling  documentary "Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse,"  with its
unprecedented behind-the-scenes look at the things  that really go on during the
making of a movie.
        Also, David Mamet's "Homicide," with Joe Mantegna as a  Jewish cop who
gets in touch with his own identity while in  the middle of two tangled cases;
Jacques Rivette's absorbing  "La Belle Noiseuse," with Michel Piccoli as an old
artist  who has not painted in years, and Emmanuelle Beart as the  muse who
inspires him; Mario Van Peebles' "New Jack City,"  with its strong performance
by Wesley Snipes as a doomed  drug kingpin; Jonathan Demme's "The Silence of the
Lambs,"  with the most unforgettable performance of the year, by  Anthony
Hopkins as a perverse murderer; and George Sluizer's  "The Vanishing," a
chilling thriller in which the audience  knows most of what has happened, but
not why -- or what it  will lead to.

It was actually a pretty good year at the movies, I  realized as I went
through my memories. Among the other  moments in the dark I especially enjoyed
were those provided  by "Antonia and Jane," about a checkered friendship between
two women; "Barton Fink," with its lurid portrait of  Hollywood hopelessness;
John Sayles' "City of Hope,"  assembling some 34 characters in a montage of a
dying city;  "City Slickers," with its yuppies on a dude ranch; "The  Doctor,"
with William Hurt finding the shoe on the other  foot; "The Double Life of
Veronique," about the mysteries of  identity; "Guilty by Suspicion," with Robert
De Niro  enduring the Hollywood blacklist; and Mel Gibson as  "Hamlet."

French director Agnes Varda made a touching tribute to  her late
husband, the director Jacques Demy, in "Jacques de  Nantes;" the Chinese film
"Ju Dou" vibrated with passion;  Spike Lee's "Jungle Fever" showed a man under
great family  and sexual pressure; Steve Martin's "LA Story" was whimsical  and
poetic; Jodie Foster's "Little Man Tate" gave us a kid  who was maybe too smart
for his own good; "The Long Walk  Home" starred Whoopi Goldberg and Sissy Spacek
as women  learning to know one another during the Montgomery bus  boycott; and
"Mortal Thoughts" starred Demi Moore and Bruce  Willis in a tangled web of
domestic murder.
        Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward gave brilliant  performances in "Mr. and
Mrs. Bridge"; young Anna Chlumsky  made a brilliant debut in "My Girl"; Gus Van
Sant's "My Own  Private Idaho" used Shakespeare's Falstaff saga as the  starting
place for a strange film about male hustlers; John  Malkovich and Andie
MacDowell tried to make ends meet in  "The Object of Beauty"; Richard Dreyfuss
gave a brilliant  offbeat performance in "Once Around"; Danny DeVito and
Penelope Ann Miller sparkled and spat in "Other People's  Money"; "Point Break"
was a stylish, offbeat thriller; in  "Slacker," the camera followed first one
and then another  character through the demimonde of Austin, Texas; "Soapdish"
had lots of fun with the world of soap opera; the special  effects made
"Terminator 2" one of the best of the  Schwarzenegger epics; and Madonna let the
cameras backstage  in "Truth or Dare," even if backstage still felt a lot like
a performance.
                COPYRIGHT 1991 THE EBERT CO. LTD.