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We’d like to direct your attention back to Eric Hynes’s superb piece on John Hughes’s seminal Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, written for Reverse Shot’s 2007 symposium “On Demand.”. A wide-ranging yet specific look at what Hughes meant to teen video culture, but also the film culture at large, the essay “Be Kind, Rewind” is the perfect tribute to this undoubted icon of our formative years.
Here’s a sample:
John Hughes movies don’t lose anything on the small screen. That may sound like a backhanded compliment, but only because cinephiles tend to place greater value on the pictorial (or, tellingly territorial: “cinematic”) qualities of film over the meat and potatoes—and eminently televisible aspects—of story and character. Hughes’s art depends on the quality of the writing, full stop. When his writing is good, as in Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off , his films are as funny, exhilarating, and remain as timeless as anything from the post-silent, pre-television heyday of Preston Sturges and Ernst Lubitsch. Those writer-auteurs could emphasize what they wished, make use of the camera without making spectacle, entertain without busily bombasting against irrelevancy, spin a good yarn, talk clever and pratfall with precision, and leave room for the stars to shine. (The same extended to critics, as I can’t imagine another time when James Agee could champion, as he did, Charlie Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux—all coded, jokes-caught-in-the-throat dialogue, with major action transpiring off-screen and far from its flat, stage-like interiors—as the height of cinematic achievement.) Hughes didn’t operate during that era, and didn’t receive that level of respect or critical praise, but from the mid Eighties to the early Nineties, he was very, very successful at reaching his target audience of young adults, college students, and post-grads. That these were precisely the years of the home video boom, and that his audience was the generation that fueled and presided over that boom, was absolutely crucial to his success. The John Hughes generation didn’t care a whit about aspect ratios or screen size. They cared about laughing and about feeling smart while laughing, and they cared about relating. Home video and cable television only made it easier to connect, to own the connection and revisit it at will.
Read it in its entirety here.
Some say list-making is a waste of time. Some may think it a fool’s errand to narrow down an entire decade’s (let alone a century’s) output into a finely tuned selection of the greatest and dearest to our hearts. And with such a fecund period of quality filmmaking as the 1990s, it would seem nigh impossible to select, say, a mere one hundred films as “the best.” But here at Reverse Shot, we dug deep, and here are the results of a collaborative effort, culled together by a handful of our editors and writers from a highly selective, democratic, even scientific voting process. There will surely be titles that we have overlooked, and others whose inclusion that many of you will disagree with. Nevertheless, without shame or guile, we present our 100 Greatest Films of the 1990s.
1. Inventing the Abbots (O’Connor, 1997)
2. The Paper (Howard, 1994)
3. Wind (Ballard, 1992)
4. Johnny Mnemonic (Longo, 1995)
5. Nell (Apted, 1994)
6. Beautiful Girls (Demme, 1996)
7. The Pillow Book (Greenaway, 1996)
8. Sarafina! (Roodt, 1992)
9. Peter’s Friends (Branagh, 1992)
10. The Spitfire Grill (Zlotoff, 1996)
11. The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain (Monger, 1995)
12. White Squall (Scott, 1996)
13. Angels in the Outfield (Dear, 1994)
14. Mixed Nuts (Ephron, 1994)
15. Eye of the Beholder (Elliott, 1999)
16. How to Make an American Quilt (Moorhouse, 1995)
17. Supercop (American rerelease, Tong, 1992)
18. A Civil Action (Zaillian, 1998)
19. Consenting Adults (Pakula, 1992)
20. Love! Valour! Compassion! (Mantello, 1997)
21. Sommersby (Amiel, 1993)
22. (tie) 1492: Conquest of Paradise (Scott, 1992) /Christopher Columbus: the Discovery (Glen, 1992)
23. The First Wives Club (Wilson, 1996)
24. Sliver (Noyce, 1993)
25. Death Becomes Her (Zemeckis, 1992)
26. Kalifornia (Sena, 1993)
27. With Honors (Keshishian, 1994)
28. Diggstown (Ritchie, 1992)
29. Threesome (Fleming, 1994)
30. Last Action Hero (McTiernan, 1993)
31. Kiss Me Guido (Vitale, 1997)
32. The Public Eye (Franklin, 1992)
33. Jack the Bear (Herskovitz, 1991)
34. Milk Money (Benjamin, 1994)
35. Untamed Heart (Bill, 1993)
36. The Doctor (Haines, 1991)
37. Trapped in Paradise (Gallo, 1994)
38.The Story of Us (Reiner, 1999)
39. Wishmaster (Kurtzman, 1997)
40. Multiplicity (Ramis, 1996)
41. The Super (Daniel, 1991)
42. Judge Dredd (Cannon, 1995)
43. Body of Evidence (Edel, 1993)
44. City of Angels (Silberling, 1998)
45. Curly Sue (Hughes, 1991)
46. Quest for Camelot (Du Chau, 1998)
47. Daddy’s Dyin . . . Who’s Got the Will? (Fisk, 1990)
48. Daylight (Cohen, 1996)
49. The Shawshank Redemption (Darabont, 1994)
50. Dying Young (Schumacher, 1991)
51. Unstrung Heroes (Keaton, 1995)
52. Medicine Man (McTiernan, 1992)
53. EdTV (Howard, 1998)
54. First Knight (Zucker, 1995)
55. (tie) 2 Days in the Valley (Herzfeld, 1996) / 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag (Schulman, 1997)
56. Girl 6 (Lee, 1996)
57. Ulee’s Gold (Nunez, 1997)
58. The Perez Family (Nair, 1995)
59. Drop Dead Fred (de Jong, 1991)
60. Billy Bathgate (Benton, 1991)
61. The Air Up There (Glaser, 1994)
62. The Madness of King George (Hytner, 1994)
63. Singles (Crowe, 1992)
64. The Mirror Has Two Faces (Streisand, 1996)
65. Flawless (Schumacher, 1999)
66. 54 (Christopher, 1998)
67. Marvin’s Room (Zaks, 1996)
68. Gone Fishin’ (Cain, 1997)
69. Widows’ Peak (Irvin, 1994)
70. Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead (Fleder, 1995)
71. Mrs. Winterbourne (Benjamin, 1996)
72. Operation Dumbo Drop (Wincer, 1995)
73. Virtuosity (Leonard, 1995)
74. Disclosure (Levinson, 1994)
75. Being Human (Forsythe, 1993)
76. Once Upon a Crime (Levy, 1992)
77. Strictly Business (Hooks, 1991)
78. Congo (Marshall, 1995)
79. Surviving Picasso (Ivory, 1996)
80. Mr. Nanny (Gottlieb, 1993)
81. Dead Man on Campus (Cohn, 1998)
82. Anna and the King (Tennant, 1999)
83. Fled (Hooks, 1996)
84. Almost Heroes (Guest, 1999)
85. American Beauty (Mendes, 1999)
86. Batman Forever (Schumacher, 1995)
87. Last Dance (Beresford, 1996)
88. The Pompatus of Love (Schenckman, 1996)
89. The Big Green (Sloane, 1995)
90. Trial and Error (Lynn, 1997)
91. The Minus Man (Fancher, 1999)
92. White Man’s Burden (Nakano, 1995)
93. Malice (Becker, 1993)
94. Whore (Russell, 1991)
95. Universal Soldier (Emmerich, 1992)
96. Forget Paris (Crystal, 1995)
97. Dante’s Peak (Donaldson, 1997)
98. Something to Talk About (Hallstrom, 1995)
99. Powder (Salva, 1995)
100. Nothing but Trouble (Aykroyd, 1991)
Anything we left off? Let us know!
Animator Bill Melendez managed no small feat. He brought Charles Schulz’s angsty, minutely expressive line drawings, whose names included Linus, Lucy, Schroeder, Shermy, Sally, and Charlie Brown, to vivid life—without sacrificing their choppy, charming existentialism. While all around him, the Peanuts were steadfastly becoming a brand (pencils, lunch boxes, calendars, and soon a Sno-Cone maker), Melendez in 1965, with the masterpiece A Charlie Brown Christmas, burrowed to the essence of what made Schulz’s comic strip great: that mix of faith and pragmatism, reflective of a unmistakably American spirit that nevertheless cast grave doubts on itself.
Schulz usually gets all the credit here (and certainly Christmas and its brilliant follow-up, It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown are full of delicately wrought laugh lines), but just think about the direction of Christmas‘s penultimate scene. Few things in this world give me chills more consistently than Linus’s dramatic, fateful walk to center stage after Charlie Brown’s face-raised imploring “Isn’t there anyone who can tell me what Christmas is all about?”, shown in extreme long shot, the tiny boy’s body dwarfed by some greater being. As Linus begins to recite from the New Testament (reaching its pinnacle with “Fear not! For, behold, I bring you tidings of great joy, which shall be to all my people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ, the Lord”), Melendez responds with lovely dissolves and a soundtrack suddenly free of Vince Guaraldi’s gentle jazz. It’s one of the most beautifully directed religious scenes ever put on film (similar in its power and directness to Scorsese’s final moments of The Last Temptation of Christ, which also has the ability to move nonbelievers to tears). As with Linus’s final imploring to the absent Great Pumpkin, Melendez uses the simplicity of zooms and an elegantly sparse, Schulz-derived framing to deepen and expand upon the strip’s naturally constrictive punchline-centered format. The Mexican-born Melendez, who died this week at ninety-one, helped create some of the most watched short films in American history; their description of joy through melancholy has had a profound effect on me for many years, and I thank him , eternally, for that.
Generally in these circles, we reserve our authoritative regret for the deaths of certain types of filmmakers. Hence, over the past year, the passing of those filmmakers who have attained grand critical standing, whether by virtue of long, fruitful careers outside of the mainstream (Edward Yang, Ousmane Sembene) or status as hallowed legends who helped navigate world cinema (Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni) received a lot of digital print on erudite film blogs. I fear that a director such as Anthony Minghella, who passed away today at the young age of 54, still of undisclosed causes, will not receive the same amount of reminiscence; one could argue that this is because he didn’t have a full career to prove himself, but it’s also just as likely that Minghella’s passing will be met with great disinterest due to his status as a purveyor of middlebrow. Ah, middlebrow, that terrible word that raises the cackles of any respectable Mikio Naruse retrospective–attending, Maurice Pialat–praising cinephile. Yet as simple as it is to identify Minghella’s track record as award-baiting or eminently tasteful (damning terms), it’s just as easy to overlook the genuine craft at work in some of his films. The English Patient, derided for its swoony, bodice-ripping romanticism as much as its deviations from its source novel, is nevertheless an effective period drama of the first order, layered and complex in that capital-T thematic way that displays a technical mastery of screenwriting (more than emotional subtlety, yes, but when a film is this attuned to the intricacies of human interaction and language, it seems like nitpicking). And while Cold Mountain and Breaking and Entering suffered greatly for the thickness of their creation and constant underlining of their ideas, they each had moments of stunning clarity. (I still have yet to see Minghella’s lauded debut, Truly Madly Deeply.)
So I save my greatest praise for The Talented Mr. Ripley, a psychological thriller of the first order, and a lucid mix of “old-fashioned” craftsmanship with modern sensibility. Minghella reimagines Patricia Highsmith’s fifties-era novel and does something terrifyingly “middlebrow”: he fishes around for motivations, diagnoses, and pathos, and comes up with a warm-blooded image of a cold-blooded killer. It’s the kind of thing that really shouldn’t work, but Minghella shows so much interest in the main characters here that nearly every scene pops with humane fascination. Returning to Purple Noon, Ripley’s first incarnation, seems a particularly frozen, fruitless exercise after Minghella dared to describe everyone in such detail; Matt Damon manages a “sympathetic” portrayal of twinned repressed homosexuality and murderous upward mobility that manages to miraculously not offended while making you justifiably queasy; meanwhile Jude Law and Cate Blanchett’s x-ray–precise portraits of privilege prove that sociopathic behavior comes in all shapes and sizes. Minghella also adds so much ripe period detail of fifties Italy and injects so much of the film with a palpable sexual urge (it’s one of the most boldly homoerotic mainstream releases of all time, and the reason why Law became a household name) that the film even manages to catch up to To Catch a Thief, to name one work from the master this film obviously means to ape. Ripley‘s the kind of glossy prestige movie that gives the word “middlebrow” a good name, the kind that should make such classifications null. Take another look, and notice the talent we’ve lost today.
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