The Year in Movies

The above title is, happily, a misnomer, since for the first time since about 1990 I don't feel qualified to summarize the movie year. 1997 (at least the latter half) was a breakthrough year for me, personally--for once I didn't subject myself repeatedly to the faceless parade of Hollywood "product." It was difficult, for sure. I had to skip many things that might have been OK, and I had to fight the idiotic urge I have to see everything, to be complete. But I did it. Because of my move to Chicago in May, I could finally be choosy, and the result is, from top to bottom, easily my strongest list ever.

So my Year in Movies consisted of stuff that virtually nobody saw, due to the sorry state of distribution in this country. Three of my top ten don't even have U.S. distributors. And only three of them have genuine 1997 copyright dates. One of the movies on the list is 6 years old, and one is 30! The most successful movie financially on my list is The Sweet Hereafter, which milked it's Cannes Grand Prix and 2 major Oscar nominations to the tune of $4.3 million in its disappointing American run. None of the others broke a mil. Forget Jim Carrey, I wouldn't be surprised if, put together, the nine other movies made less in the U.S. than Jim-freakin'-Varney did on his last job. What I'm saying is, this list really couldn't be less relevant to the state of the Movie Biz in this country.

I didn't choose these movies to be esoteric or contrary (though I plead guilty to both of these charges from time to time). They're simply 10 great films that moved me over the last 12 months, and I think they can move a lot more people than they have, if given half a chance.

For eligibility rules, see the Tedious Minutia page. This year I've decided to include the older films Le Samouraï and The House is Black, because they have never been screened theatrically in this country before 1997. American Job, which I also included, has a tricky history. The film has a copyright date of 1995. I was lucky enough to see it when in premiered at the University of Iowa's Bijou theater in October 1995 (I gave it four stars in my review for the university paper, the Daily Iowan). After a few sporadic screenings, it showed at Sundance in 1997, and though it didn't snag a distributor, it became part of the touring FUEL mini-festival that made its way around the country. That's distribution, sorta.

I just started this web site in June '98, and though I composed this list in February, I'm just writing the capsules now (mid-July), so (1) I have the benefit of hindsight and (2) I don't remember the movies as well as I would have had I composed these "reviews" earlier. This is not good critical practice, I know. It won't happen again.

The List

10. American Job (Chris Smith, 1995)
I swear it's just a coincidence that the best American indie of the last couple years was made by someone who used to date my ex-roommate. This small masterpiece was shot in Iowa City, IA for about $25,000, and it's one of the few films I can think of that undoubtably benefitted from its ridiculously low budget. It's a hilarious, minimalist look at the life of a soft-spoken, um, slacker (Randy Russell), who bounces around from crappy job to crappy job. Devestating in its critique and daring in its willingness to present the rhythms of a boring workday, the movie's like a mixture of Bresson, Linklater and some ungodly industrial training film. I think it's showing on the Independent Film Channel sometime in July 1998, so be on the lookout.
9. Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist (Kirby Dick, 1997)
This documentary got quite a bit of press on account of its notorious centerpiece scene, which I guess I won't give away even though most of you probably know about it, and yes, it is difficult to watch. (I think it was the first time since I originally saw the face-ripping scene in Poltergeist when I was 13 that I had to avert my eyes from a movie.) But it's absolutely essential to the therapeutic effect of Kirby Dick's intense portrait of the Cystic Fibrosis-stricken performance artist who employed acts of extreme self-torture in order to, in a way, gain the upper hand on his painful disease. 1997's saddest movie, and, with Terry Zwigoff's Crumb, probably the last word on tortured artists.
8. Underground (Emir Kusturica, 1995)
Well, the Cannes '95 Palme d'Or winner finally made it to America over two years later, and it was worth the wait. It's definitely a bit overblown, it skimps a little in the final section, and I could have done without the obvious and l-o-n-g final sequence (a reuniting of characters that's nearly as insufferable as the one at the end of Deconstructing Harry), but scene-for-scene this is riveting stuff. It's a surreal and satisfyingly exhausting three-hour meditation on war and peace in the Balkans with two incredible lead performances (by Miki Manojlovic and Lazar Risovsky, who, as physical comedians, put Jim Carrey to shame), some unforgettable set-pieces, and a boundless energy.
7. La Promesse (Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, 1996)
Shot in semi-documentary style, this Belgian import is about a teen (Jérémie Renier) who vows to help the family of an illegal immigrant killed in an accident facilitated and covered-up by his tyrranical father (Olivier Gourmet). I'll admit I wasn't really looking forward to this when I saw the trailer--it looked like too much of a downer--but it's near-perfect. Absorbing, gritty and heartbreaking, with great low-key acting, it offers up a kind of politically-charged naturalism that nobody outside of Ken Loach bothers with anymore.
6. Fast, Cheap and Out of Control (Errol Morris, 1997)
Describing it as the confessions of a hedge-sculptor, a lion-tamer, a mole rat specialist, and a robot scientist gives absolutely no sense of the mysterious and wonderful places Morris' docu . . .um, non-fiction film takes us. Is it about Art vs. Science? The Futility of Human Endeavor? Immortality? I'm not sure, but practically everything Morris gives us in his collage--interviews, images, snippets of older films--bounces off something else in an interesting way. Utterly original and way-too-good for the Academy Awards' pathetic documentary category, this is the kind of movie where when you walk out of the theater, the world looks a little different. Like Mark Rappaport's From the Journals of Jean Seberg, my favorite movie of 1996, it feels like reading a provocative essay and having a vivid dream at the same time.
5. L'Eau froide [Cold Water] (Olivier Assayas, 1994)
The first of two entries I saw this year from Assayas, this entertaining and moving teen drama inexplicably never got a U.S. distributor, though it played twice to a sold-out house at the (admittedly small) theater at Facets Multimedia in Chicago. The film was made as part of a series (which also included, most prominently, André Téchiné's wonderful Wild Reeds) in which several French filmmakers examined their Seventies youth using pop music from the era. It features a searing performance by Virginie Ledoyen as the seriously rebellious heroine, masterful hand-held camera work, and a teen party scene to end all teen party scenes.
4.Le Samouraï (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1967)
I know it's not really fair to pit a legendary classic against contemporary fare, but in 1997 Melville's minimalist policier finally got a U.S. release, and it's hard to think of a film that's aged more gracefully. It looks to me like one of the most influential movies ever, and as a portrait of an alienated hit-man it has never been topped, Woo and Takeshi be damned. Smooth and modulated, Alain Delon's brilliant performance subtly reveals the tragic romanticism beneath his character's (and the movie's) icy exterior.
3. The Sweet Hereafter (Atom Egoyan, 1997)
I was definitely wary when I heard that my favorite in-his-prime filmmaker decided to follow up his masterpiece Exotica with an adaptation of a Russell Banks novel, but I needn't have worried. Egoyan is Egoyan and this is one of his best, and probably his most accessible, puzzle-narratives. Ian Holm, who hands down should have won the Oscar, plays a big-city lawyer with mysterious motives who seeks to represent the families of the victims of a small-town schoolbus crash. Sarah Polley and Bruce Davidson (both of Exotica) are nearly as good as Holm as a crash survivor and a parent of one of the victims. The deservedly lauded crash scene is a miracle of suggestion and understatement, but this film is full of unforgettable moments, my personal favorite being a haunting flashback featuring a spider bite, a baby and a knife.
2. A Brighter Summer Day (Edward Yang, 1991)
It's really impossible to capture the essence of a great film in a hasty capsule review. I feel this way about all of the films above but it especially applies to this masterpiece, a four-hour stunner about growing up in Taiwan in the early 1960s. I was lucky enough to see this at a Yang retrospective at the Film Center in Chicago; you could probably count its other U.S. screenings on one hand. If you ever get a chance to see it, drop everything. This is one of those epics that provides a novelistic richness of detail that can only be achieved in a long film. You may know what I'm talking about--a feeling that you really know the characters and a kind of nostalgic longing, as toward the end you remember things you'd forgotten from the first hour. A major achievement that demands a second viewing that I'm seriously afraid I'll never get.
1. Irma Vep (Olivier Assayas, 1996)
I've heard this movie criticized for containing too many "in-jokes" about the history of French Cinema, and therefore being inaccessible to the "casual" (whatever that means) viewer. DO NOT BE AFRAID. Irma Vep is intelligent, hilarious, and exhilirating, and it's also one of the most "fun" movies you're likely to see. Obviously liberated by an extremely fast shoot and an improvisational style, Assayas rewards us with one jawdropping scene after another. The plot concerns the folly of a film crew trying to remake Feuillade's 1917 serial Les Vampires, starring Asian superstar Maggie Cheung (who plays herself) as the master criminal Irma Vep. Unlike Truffaut's sentimental Day For Night, this movie's not just a nostalgic lament for "The Cinema" but a reckless leap into its future.

Runners up (in order): The House is Black (Forough Farrokhzad, 1963); Comment je me suis disputé . . . (ou ma vie sexuelle) [My Sex Life, or How I Got Into an Argument] (Arnaud Desplechin, 1996); Nénette et Boni (Claire Denis, 1996); In the Company of Men (Neil LaBute, 1997); Lost Highway (David Lynch, 1997); Y aura-t-il de la neige à Noël? [Will it Snow For Christmas?] (Sandrine Veysset, 1996); Chacun cherche son chat [When the Cat's Away] (Cédric Klapisch, 1996); Career Girls (Mike Leigh, 1997); Crash (David Cronenberg, 1996); Boogie Nights (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1997)