Welcome to 5 Favorites. Each week, I will put together a list of my 5 favorites (films, performances, whatever strikes my fancy) along with commentary on a given topic each week, usually in relation to a specific film releasing that week.
The 1990s were the first decade I really made an effort to watch all the films that I could. Sure, I spent a lot of time in the theater ignoring classics, but it wasn’t for nothing. The 1990s happened to be the decade I found it most difficult to narrow to 5 films. I could easily do a top 5 for every year and still have challenging choices. However, I’m sticking to five only. Thus, there’s a lengthy list of films I considered but didn’t select.
Here they are: Europa Europa (1990), The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Thelma & Louise (1991), The Player (1992), Blue (1993), Jurassic Park (1993), The Piano (1993), Little Women (1994), Pulp Fiction (1994), Red (1994), White (1994), Babe (1995), Dead Man Walking (1995), Leaving Las Vegas (1995), The English Patient (1996), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996), Mother (1996), Secrets & Lies (1996), Star Trek: First Contact (1996), L.A. Confidential (1997), The Sweet Hereafter (1997), Beloved (1998), Elizabeth (1998), Mulan (1998), and Magnolia (1999).
Unlike prior decades, I want to say a short bit about a handful of films that didn’t make my final list, but could have given a mood change.
GoodFellas (1990) wasn’t the first Scorsese film I saw, but it is certainly one of his best. Second only to The Age of Innocence in his 1990s output. The Joy Luck Club (1993) was a gorgeous story about the lives of four Chinese mothers and their attempts to make better lives for their children. It was emotionally resonant and wonderfully human. Evita (1996) is still the greatest musical of the 1990s. I’d say it was better than much of what came after it including Chicago. I acknowledge that the film had its drawbacks, namely its non-stop musical elements, but it was a terrific movie with Madonna’s easily best performance.
Boogie Nights (1997) was my first Paul Thomas Anderson film and it’s still the best of all of his movies I’ve seen. A fascinating and rich tapestry depicting the porn industry at a difficult time. The Ice Storm (1997) was an acting tour-de-force with a haunting conclusion and remains the only Atom Egoyan film I care for passionately. Titanic (1997) was the biggest film in the world and I saw it several times in theaters. It was the human tragedy behind it rather than the characters at its heart that made the film.
Gods and Monsters (1998) almost made the cut and it was because it was one of the first 1990s gay-themed films that resonated with me. Ian McKellen was robbed. The Thin Red Line (1998) is probably the pinnacle of Terrence Malick’s career (though others would disagree. Looking at the horrors of war in a pointed and evocative way, it remains one of the great anti-war pictures. The Truman Show (1998) also almost made the cut. It’s a great vehicle for Jim Carrey, but it’s the science fiction narrative about control and nurturing and their limitations in a surveillance state. Finally, Princess Mononoke (1999) was the first Hayao Miyazaki film and it, along with Spirited Away, brought me to my love for Miyazaki, the only anime films I can stand to watch.
With that out of the way, here are the final five.
Beauty and the Beast (1991)
Walt Disney Animation has struggled to keep a consistent pipeline of quality films since its inception. The 1920s/30s and 1950s/1960s eras were each followed by fallow periods for the studio where output was considered somewhat lackluster. While the studio is trying to get out of its post-2010s period right now, their biggest and best revival was the one that started in 1989 with the release of The Little Mermaid. What would follow is one of the greatest strings of Disney successes ever with their 1991 adaptation of Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont’s classic fairy tale La Belle et la Bête the pinnacle of their output. Beauty and the Beast saw Disney working to perfection.
The tale of a woman held prisoner by a callous beast with whom she falls in love is one of the all-time great, sometimes problematic, romantic storylines. When taken at its purest, as it is in this case, the end result is a gorgeous “tale as old as time” that successfully blends animation and music in a wonderful and moving piece. The vocal work from Paige O’Hara, Robby Benson, Richard White, Jerry Orbach, David Ogden Stiers, and the inestimable Angela Lansbury gave warmth and affection to their characters and made this an achievement that has not since been topped.
My Original Review of the 3D release in 2012
The Crying Game (1992)
There was a time in the late 1980s when indie cinema struggled for traction. There were plenty of films being made that fell into that category, but few of them managed to make big waves in Hollywood. If not for Miramax, that would still be the state of the industry. Through the successes of films like sex, lies and videotape and and My Left Foot, the studio redefined the concept of indie cinema and bolstered a new generation of filmmakers.
Upon release, The Crying Game was the pinnacle of the Miramax’s indie successes. Director Neil Jordan gave Stephen Rea, Miranda Richardson, and Jaye Davidson the roles of their careers in this haunting exploration of the nature of love and how it could be redefined for a new generation. While Pulp Fiction could rightly be lauded as the best film Miramax ever released, The Crying Game isn’t that far below it and, in many ways, is the better film.
Schindler’s List (1993)
While all filmmakers have their misses, few filmmakers have worked consistently at the top of their field without taking long gaps between projects. Steven Spielberg’s output has always been solid beginning with Duel and Jaws going straight through West Side Story and The Fabelmans. Yet, it’s almost in the middle of this long span of solid output that Spielberg put up the singular achievement that is Schindler’s. Nothing he had done before or has done since has reached quite this zenith.
The film is a horrifying, yet hopeful look at the worst events of World War II, namely Adolf Hitler’s pogrom against the Jews, initially just a political pawn and eventually a target for eradication. This film tells the story of capitalist munitions manufacturer Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson) as he puts together a list of essential workers from the ranks of Germany’s Jewish population to work in his factory where his defense of them would help isolate them from some of the worst offenses of the war, but not all of them. It’s a film that must be told to future generations, a captivating and heart-wrenching film whose lessons resonate stronger and more essentially with each passing year.
Contact (1997)
Is there a satisfactory segue from one of the greatest dramas of all-time to one of the best science fiction films ever made? The only capable connection might be the filmmakers. Robert Zeemeckis might not have emerged from the 1970s like Spielberg, but like Spielberg, he turned a genre that had been the purview of B-movies into something that could be considered essential and popular while maintaining their creative edge. For Zemeckis, his biggest ’80s success was Back to the Future. Like Spielberg’s ’70s contemporary Francis Ford Coppolla, Zemeckis’ career post-Contact has been largely one embarrassment after another. However, through 1997, Zemeckis was still one of the great working filmmakers.
Contact is based on Carl Sagan’s popular novel about Dr. Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster), an astrophysics expert whose lifelong desire is to make contact with aliens from distant solar systems. Working for the SETI program at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, she helps intercept a coded transmission that provides schematics to build a device capable of extra-dimensional travel, which she posits will catapult her galaxies away to meet this advanced, alien civilization. She faces skepticism from the U.S. government and protests from religious organizations, but persists in her attempts to make contact. A film that demands discussion afterwards is seldom seen these days. Contact asks the audiences to question what they’ve seen and decide whether there is sufficient evidence of alien civilizations out there and whether the nature of faith is solely under the purview of organized religion.
Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
Spielberg made consistently good films throughout his career, but he releases roughly one new movie every year or two (or a half). A filmmaker like Stanley Kubrick, once he left behind the world of the studio system, often went several years between pictures, his lengthiest absence was from the release of Full Metal Jacket in 1987 to Eyes Wide Shut 12 years later. While he certainly intended to keep going with other projects on deck, Eyes Wide Shut would prove to be his final film. He died in March not long before it would be released, but certainly not without his trademark tinkering right up to the end. Most people will remember the furor around the film’s bounteous nudity and the censoring that Warner Bros. demanded of the film after Kubrick’s death, inserting digital figures to block all manners of sexual congress.
Taken at its core, the film is one of Kubrick’s most personal, analyzing the little lies we tell our significant others and ourselves to preserve the integrity of our relations. Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, then married, starred in the film as a New York City power couple who have a falling out after a Christmas Party where it’s revealed that Kidman’s Alice had an affair on Cruise’s Bill years before. After the argument, Bill wanders the city streets in search of clarity, but comes across temptation in many forms. Each episode gives him an opportunity to have a revenge affair. Can he maintain faithfulness in spite of such enticements. What happens and what it reveals about the nature of fidelity are boundless and it’s ultimately one final triumph for a filmmaker whose career was boundless in its creative and philosophical depth and influence.
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