Future Poltergeist

I mentioned Goodfellas yesterday and commented to Rachel that it's one of the top five films of the 90's. Well, since I spent a whole year studying the darn movies, I thought I'd whip up a quick list of the top ten. First the runners up, in no particular order: LA Confidential Good Will Hunting Forrest Gump Pulp Fiction The Sixth Sense English Patient Toy Story Princess Mononoke Four Weddings and a Funeral Shakespeare in Love And then the top ten: 10. Braveheart (brought back the epic film, great battle scenes) 9. Silence of the Lambs (very scary, launched a new shift in crime drama where the villain is cool) 8. Life is Beautiful (incredible blend of comedy and tragedy, No Spiders or Visigoths Allowed) 7. Titanic (great love story, great disaster film) 6. Apollo 13 (maybe the top engineer film of all time) 5. Saving Private Ryan (heart wrenching portrayal of D-Day) 4. Unforgiven (relaunched the Western, Eastwood is brilliant) 3. Goodfellas (best mob movie of all ...

About time I do a wrap up from last year's movie project . Here's each year's review 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 Out of the 50 movies, I rated 17 as great, 9 as very good, 14 as good, 6 as fair and 4 as bad. The four bad ones? Dances with Wolves, Il Postino, the Godfather III and Thin Red Line. I agreed with the Best Movie pick six times. Of the ten movies that I hadn't seen before, Remains of the Day was probably the best. I forced the FP Gal to watch many movies, Life is Beautiful being the best one that was newest to her. The best musical score was Shakespeare in Love. Most surprisingly good music to me was Thin Red Line. The whole project was so much fun that we're doing it again this year. After much deliberation, I'm going with the 1980's. Same rules as before, each of the best picture nominees from each year. Should be fun!

Green Mile Cider House Rules Sixth Sense The Insider American Beauty (Last one!) Kind of a mixed bag of movies for this year. One great one. One near great one. Two good ones and one that's only fair. Great acting throughout. Interesting stories throughout. American Beauty brought home the Oscar. I rated the Sixth Sense a bit higher, but I've got no problem with the way it went. The only music that really stood out was from American Beauty. It stood out for being different but not necessarily great. This was a pretty good year for movies. About a dozen or so that are good enough to be nominated. Some of my choices would be Fight Club, Being John Malkovich, Princess Mononoke and Rushmore.

"Both my wife and daughter think I'm this chronic loser. And they're right. I have lost something." That's the central insight of this film. The engine that drives it. Kevin Spacey plays a man who is lost and unhappy in his life. He doesn't respect himself. He doesn't like who his wife has become. He feels alienated from his daughter. And he doesn't know how to change. Until two chance meetings kick him out of his rut. The first meeting is with his daughter's girlfriend (Mena Suvari). He instantly falls in love with her. The film shows this in a series of fantasies involving rose petals. She's much too young for him (and this subplot is a little creepy). His desire to become attractive to her makes him want to improve himself. The second meeting is with the new neighbor kid (Wes Bentley). He's incredibly self-assured. And sells pot. This meeting brings back memories of his high school years and triggers him to try and regain...

I liked this movie a bunch better back in '99. Back then I still respected 60 Minutes and the idea of the hero journalist still had some credibility. It's much harder not to take sides in 2005 than it was six years ago. The movie centers on Al Pacino playing a 60 Minutes producer as he stumbles across a former tabacco industry researcher. Russell Crowe plays the researcher. He's been fired from his position due to a combination of disagreement on research and an inability to control his temper. He thinks that Big Tobacco execs perjured themselves before congress when they testified that they don't think tobacco is addictive. He wants to tell his story but he has signed a confidentiality agreement and can't come forward. Pacino helps Crowe to come forward. He urges Crowe to follow his consience. He manipulates a law suit in another state as a way to get his testimony on record. He brings security to his home to fend off death threats. He finally gets the in...

This is a great movie. If you haven't seen it, you should. ***Spoilers ahead*** You can't really discuss the movie without them. The ending kind of overshadows the rest of the movie and that's kind of a shame. The movie is well written and very very well acted. Most people think of Bruce Willis as kind of a goofy guy that does action movies, but he shows quite a bit of depth in this movie. He plays a child psychologist who is beating himself up over a kid that he couldn't help. Toni Collette is also very good. She plays the single mother of a troubled boy and she can't figure out why he's troubled or what to do about it. She's in an impossible position and does the best she can. Very good. But the movie is stolen by Haley Joel Osmont. He gives one of the best performances by a child actor in the history of film. He plays a boy who is haunted. He can see dead people. They come to him at odd times and scare him badly. They don't understand th...

This is the first time I've seen this movie. Good, but not really that great. It's based on the novel by John Irving and it feels cut down. The movie stars Tobey Maguire before he was bitten by a radioactive (er, genetically enhanced) spider. He plays an orphan who was never adopted. Instead he was trained by the resident doctor of the orphanage played by Michael Caine. The two have an ongoing discussion over the morality/necessity of abortion. The orphanage is something of a magnet for wayward girls and the doctor performs abortions regularly. When Maguire's orphan comes of age, he leaves the orphanage to seek his fortune and see the world. He ends up at an apple orchard where he becomes a picker. His boss Mr Rose (Delroy Lindo) says that this is history referring to himself being the black boss of a white boy. Inside the bunkhouse is a list of rules. Maguire is the only one able to read them. Mr Rose says that the rules weren't written by the people who live in cabin ...

This movie is one of the closest book adaptations I've ever seen. It's the second Stephen King story after ' Shawshank Redemption '. And it's the 37th movie starring Tom Hanks on this list. The story is told as a very long flashback. It starts with a very old man named Paul Edgecombe (Hanks) in a retirement home thinking about his past. It turns out that he was the head guard on the Louisiana death row. His flashback involves a set of prisoners during the height of the Great Depression. The most notable is a giant man named John Coffey ("Like the drink, but spelled different"). Coffey is played by Michael Clark Duncan who is giant sized. He's been convicted of kidnapping and killing two twin girls. But he has a very curious talent for a murderer. The power to heal. He first shows this by healing a urinary infection of Edgecombe's. He also brings a pet mouse back from the brink of death. Edgecombe becomes convinced of his innocence and e...

Thin Red Line Elizabeth Saving Private Ryan Shakespeare in Love Life is Beautiful This year's movies are either WW II movies or Elizabethan England. Three of them are great. 'Thin Red Line' is just a pretentious bit of navel gazing. And 'Elizabeth' is only slightly above average. As far as I know, Oscar doesn't report the vote totals, but I'd be surprised if either one of them was competitive. This year is remembered as a big upset with 'Ryan' being more deserving but losing to 'Shakespeare'. After watching them many years later, I'd have to agree. 'Ryan' had problems, but it's clearly a movie for the ages. It's probably the most technically well made movie of the decade. In fact, I'd probably put 'Life' in second place. Still, it's not that big of an injustice. I still love 'Shakespeare' and probably will watch it more times in my life than the other two. As I mentioned in the review, ...

Another great movie and the second one of the project in Italian. Really it sets up as two movies in one. The first part sets up as a love story. Set in pre WWII Italy, it has the feel of an older romantic comedy. Roberto Benigni plays a country bumpkin named Guido, who is coming to the big city to find his fortune. He's incredibly carefree and playful. And his sheer happiness is infectious. "Bonjourno princepessa!", still brings a smile to faces. The story involves him wooing a teacher (Nicolleta Braschi) who is out of his league. He pulls wonderful stunts and wins her in the end. The second part of the movie happens a few years later. A son has been added to our hero's lives. We get a sense of what their everyday life is. And then father and son are taken to a concentration camp. Mom decides that she's going wherever they go and talks her way onto the train as well. Once they get to the camp, Guido makes elaborate attempts to sheild his son from t...

I love this movie and I'm not going to apologize for it. The idea of the movie is to show Shakespeare, the greatest of all playwrites, in the midst of creating one of his greatest plays, Romeo and Juliet. The earliest version being Ethel and the Pirate King, of course. The movie mixes Elizabethan England with Hollywood and the combination is genius. This movie might have the most clever script in this entire project. It features jokes for Shakespeare fans like Ann Hathaway's property being described as 'a small cottage'. It also has wonderful explanations for famous Shakespeare phrases like 'a plauge on both your houses'. Maybe my favorite feature is the depiction of stage life. Henslow's repeated wisdom that the play will go on somehow regardless of problems is a literal truism amongst theater people. We can only imagine the same thing was true then. The acting is good throughout. Joseph Fiennes is very good as Will Shakespeare. Gwenyth Paltrow do...

This is truly a great movie. This is another movie in the category of 'if you haven't seen it, what's wrong with you'. I'd like to break the review down into two categories, technical and story. First the technical which is unbelievably good. The movie opens with the D-Day invasion and it's shocking in brutality. Vetrans groups hailed it as the most realistic approximation they'd ever seen. It's very difficult to watch but even harder to turn away. German machine guns make hamburger of allied troops as they leave the troop ships. One scene has a medic valiantly stop one soldiers bleeding only to have the victim take a shot to the head. Death sweeps up and down the beach. The opening half hour of this movie shows the incredible amount of respect we owe to those who risk our lives for us. (Belated Vetran's Day thanks!) The movie is shot with a bleached out look that is very appealing. The destroyed French villages are amazing to look at. Spie...

This movie is OK at best. Which is really a shame. Queen Elizabeth I is an important figure and the story around her is very interesting. She was a woman in a man's job at a time when women were little more than property. She inherited a kingdom that was torn apart by religious strife. She faced threats from the major powers of Europe. She faced near constant threat of assassination. And she came through with flying colors. The movie compresses many of the trials in her life into a much smaller time frame. I've got no problem with that. Rewriting history for narrative sake has a long and rich history. Often it makes for a better movie. Braveheart took larger liberties than Elizabeth, but they served to better define the theme of the movie. In this movie, they serve to weaken it. Instead of seeing her playing her enemies off of one another, we see her refuse to take any of them seriously. Instead of showing her teach her subjects how to love England as she does, we see her putti...

Let me start by saying something nice about this movie. It's beautifully shot and the score is very nice. Thus concludes the compliments. The listed time for this movie is just under three hours. In reality, the movie seems to last forever. And not in a timeless way but more of a "What day is this and how long have I been stuck in here" kind of way. Thin Red Line tells the story of the taking of Guadalcanal. If it was taken by the Army Corps of bull session philosophers and not by actual soldiers. The men seem taken with trying to figure out what life is all about and why go through all of this dirty war business. They're also driven by a lieutenant colonel (Nick Nolte) who seems driven to promotion through a bloody frontal assault. In the tradition of well regarded Hollywood war movies, Nolte's character is insane and can only command through bullying. The cast is deep and performances are solid, but the movie itself is very weak. Much of the movie is t...

Good Will Hunting As Good as it Gets LA Confidential Full Monty Titanic Three great movies and two OK ones. 'As Good as it Gets' won the most acting awards, but had serious flaws. 'Full Monty' was good but very light. It was nice for both of them be nominated, but they're not really in the same league as the others. 'Good Will Hunting', 'LA Confidential' and 'Titanic' were all great but in different ways. 'Hunting' is probably the most feel good and down to earth. 'LA' has the most complex and involved plot. 'Titanic' had the most sheer impact of story. 'Titanic' won the Oscar and I can't really disagree. A pretty good year for movies.

I'll assume anyone reading this post has seen this movie, so I'll skip the synopsis. And if you haven't seen it, you probably should. I mean, it's part of our cultural heritage, so what's your problem? Firstly, I'm a sucker for love stories. And I fell for this one. There's nothing quite like young love. Fierce, idealistic and uncompromising. The idea of a penniless artist and a beautiful society girl falling for each other isn't new, but it is quite effective here. DiCaprio and Winslett are very cute together. And they're both better actors than they are given credit for. (The FP Gal thinks DiCaprio looks like Steve Buscemi. I thought she might be the only woman in the world to think so, but one of the ladies at work agrees. I don't see it all.) This is a great movie. The combination love story/action flick/disaster movie works very well. The early story is interesting as you watch the lovers come together. The stage is set well with the enormou...

This is a good light movie. The movie centers on a group of men who are out of work and hopeless. The steel industry that drove their economy has gone away. Prospects for a new job are few and far between and below their dignity. Enter the Chippendales. When a group of male strippers plays the local club, the men get the idea of raising money by become strippers themselves. They figure that if women will go crazy over those other men, they'll go even crazier over them. Then reality sets in. As they audition for a full set of dancers, they realize what a sorry lot they are. But each one has good reasons why they must go forward and they eventually do. This movie does a very good job of giving each man a different motivation and story. One does it for child support. One to recover money that his wife has been spending. The most compelling is a self described 'fat bastard' who does it to feel like a desireable man again. A good movie. I remember comparing...

This is a very complex well done story. Set in LA of the 50's, it's basically a gritty police drama. The movie follows three very different cops, Kevin Spacey, Guy Pierce and Russell Crow. Spacey is part of the LAPD/Hollywood overlap. He works as a consultant to a TV show. The fame and the bright lights are very important to him. Pierce is a climber, looking for ways to burnish his career. He's an intellectual type who is constantly told to take off his glasses so as not to project the wrong image. Crow is perhaps the most interesting of the three. He's a brutal man who believes that being a cop sometimes means breaking the rules about police brutality. The first scene with him shows that he's deeply concerned about violence towards women. He knows that he's not the brainy type but he strongly believes that his type of effort is needed to maintain law and justice. All three are very good actors and they each do very well in very different roles. ...

This movie is filled with good acting, a few memorable lines and a weak story. Jack Nicholson plays an OCD writer. Which means Jack playing Jack, but with some quirks. Like only using new soap bars and never stepping on cracks. He's about the meanest person alive. Racist and homophobic and just plain ugly to people. Greg Kinnear plays his neighbor, a gay painter with a little dog. Unable to stand confrontation and trusting to a fault. His agent picks up a model off of a street corner for him to paint. The models friends break into rob him and end up beating him savagely. Helen Hunt has the other sizeable role in the film. She plays a waitress with a sick boy. She's also the only person that can control Jack. When she misses work to tend to her boy, Jack hires a doctor to look after him so she can go back to work. When Kinnear is beaten up, Jack looks after his dog. And falls in love with it. In fact the dog gives him some humanity by falling in love back. When Kinn...

Will Hunting is a genius. He's also troubled and adrift. He's capable of understanding math that only a handful of people in the world can understand. And picking a fistfight with someone that pushed him around in kindergarten. This movie was co-written by Matt Damon and Ben Afleck. It's the movie that put them on the map. The dream of writing and then starring in a movie is pretty well universal in the acting world. These two went out and did it. The story is interesting. The acting is very good. And the dialouge is brilliant. The only other movie from this project (so far) that even comes close is 'Pulp Fiction'. But what really sells the movie is Robin Williams. He plays a counselor that tries to heal Will and help him direct his life. Williams plays a shrink with a sad past, having a buried a wife who died young and slowly. He's authentic and insightful. The 'cure' is a bit quick, but very touching. Some of Williams best work. Minnie D...