1996: Year in Review

Writer-director John Herzfeld's ensemble crime comedy is an Altman-esque affair; think Short Cuts by way of Pulp Fiction. The cast includes low-lifes and lower middle-class types mixing it up over the aforementioned time frame in the San Fernando Valley. Much bloodshed ensues. James Spader and Paul Mazursky are standouts as an icy cold blonde hitman and a down-and-out ex-film producer, respectively.

The Wachowski Brothers' directorial debut is a visually dazzling, stunningly plotted, labyrinthine neo-noir with style to spare. Gina Gershon is Corky, the man-ish lesbian who just got out of prison for "redistribution of wealth" and who has begun a job fixing up a condo in a nice mob-run building. Her next door neighbors are Caesar (Joe Pantoliano), a violent money launderer from mob middle-management, and Violet (Jennifer Tilly), his sexy mistress. From almost the moment they meet, Violet has her eyes on Corky, intrigued and, perhaps attracted. Can they be together? It certainly seems that's a viable possibility when Violet gets it in her head to steal $2 million of the mob's money from her boyfriend, framing him for the lost cash. Or maybe they could blame it on Caesar's poor dumb mob adversary (Christopher Meloni). Either way, will this end with Violet running away, and Corky in tow? The film is the writing-directing debut of Andy and Larry Wachowski, a couple of Chicago natives who have a densely plotted and sort of ingenious twist on genre conventions on their hands here, coupled with a pocketful of style. Tilly and Gershon are incredibly erotic and likable as the young couple who could just make their dreams come true. The film's screenplay is labyrinthine, occasionally veering into dark comedy, always keeping you guessing. Bill Pope's cinematography is breathtakingly inventive, sometimes classical, occasionally hyperkinetic. That, combined with razor-sharp and sometimes witty editing, makes this one of the year's best films.

NOTE: The unrated version runs 109 minutes on DVD. The Wachowskis would go on to write and direct the "Matrix" trilogy and "Speed Racer" (2008).

Robert Rodriguez directed this bizarre and fun twist on the horror genre (from a clever screenplay by Quentin Tarantino). George Clooney and Tarantino are Seth and Richie Gecko, a couple of badass criminals on the run in Texas. They hijack a family (led by now faithless ex-preacher Harvey Keitel and lovely young daughter Juliette Lewis). The band of outlaws takes to a Mexican strip bar called the Titty Twister (an absolute triumph of production design!) and finds that they are not in Texas anymore (well...duh!). Soon, this motley crew is forced to face down an army of vampires (including Salma Hayek as queen stripper Satanico Pandemonium!). This sleaze-o-rama grade-zilch horror story is preceded by a good hour or more of well-written if cliched crime movie material (Stockholm Syndrome, anyone?). Still, the performances and Rodriguez's loving treatment of the genre elevate the material to near-art.

Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson's debut film is an astonishingly assured work: a spare character study, an insider's look at the world of semi-professional gambling, and an ode to the search for redemption. Philip Baker Hall gives a flat-out masterful (if low-key) performance as Sydney, a brilliant gambler on the outskirts of Reno. Sydney comes upon a lone, scruffy sad sack named John (John C. Reilly) outside of a diner and invites him in for a cigarette and a cup of coffee. John tells Sydney his tale of woe - he lost a lot of money in Vegas and needs it to pay for a family funeral. Sydney doesn't have the money to lend, but will teach John the ropes of gambling and how to beat the casinos good enough to get a free room and a meal. Flash-forward two years to Reno, and John has befriended Sydney's troublesome associate Jimmy (Samuel L. Jackson) and is falling for a cocktail waitress and part-time hooker named Clementine (Gwyneth Paltrow). And so the circle is complete. There turns out to be a sort of a plot, but I wouldn't dare dream of giving away any more. I will say that Anderson's first film demonstrates an astonishing knowledge of his characters, a great ear for dialogue, and an assured visual sense. The cinematography by Robert Elswit paints a Reno of neon-lit nights and cold, lonely interiors. He dispatches a few Steadicams for glorious extended takes simply to watch great actors walking, and the effect is marvelous. Philip Baker Hall, an overlooked and underappreciated character actor best known for his role as Bookman the library cop on "Seinfeld," here demonstrates a range and prowess he hasn't been allowed to show since his great solo performance as Richard Nixon in Robert Altman's "Secret Honor" (1984). Here again, Hall gets deep inside the skin of a character, showing us his strengths and weaknesses, his fears and desires, making a cool, professional, button-down type utterly real and heartbreakingly human. Reilly and Paltrow are the young couple in love (or something like it), who look to Sydney for guidance in a moment of crisis, and get more than just a father figure, but a real friend. And lurking all the time, coiling around them like a snake, is the fearsome Jimmy. Samuel L. Jackson, appearing to channel some of the more theatrical moments of his Jules in Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction," makes him a cool professional as well, knowing how to handle difficult situations, but not always as calm and restrained as Sydney. These characters collide in what amounts to a powder keg and Anderson handles everything with a deft touch. He's a real filmmaker, and this proves he was all along. Keep an eye out for Philip Seymour Hoffman in an early role as a loud-mouth at the casino taunting Sydney. NOTE: Paul Thomas Anderson has since gone on to be one of my very favorite filmmakers and biggest influences, writing and directing the 70s behind-the-porn epic "Boogie Nights" (1997), the dark romantic comedy "Punch-Drunk Love" (2002), the epic tale of misanthropy and greed "There Will Be Blood" (2007), and one of my very favorite films of all time, the ensemble epic of loneliness and chance "Magnolia" (1999).

Wes Craven's latest addition to the slasher genre is both a legitimate modern teen horror film and an acidically-witty, knowingly funny, post-modernist deconstruction of the roots of the genre as it stands today; without the films to which this film pays homage, parodies and outright steals from, where would this film be? The film kicks off with a virtuoso sequence in which a lone teenage girl named Casey (Drew Barrymore) answers the phone in her big, empty house out in the middle of nowhere, and hears on the other line a deep, dark voice quizzing her with seemingly innocent yet vaguely sinister questions about horror movies. Soon, it appears that the voice belongs not to Mr. MoviePhone, but to a costumed killer (wearing a mask seemingly inspired, somewhat, by the Edvard Munch painting "The Scream") and the poor young gal is running screaming through the house, sees her boyfriend's stomach split open complete with his guts spilling out, and she's a goner. Now then: Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell of TV's "Party of Five") is a somewhat virginal and innocent northern California teen in the sleepy town of Woodsboro. It's the weekend and her father is, conveniently, going out of town on business. She has a vaguely creepy and growingly "impatient" boyfriend name Billy (Skeet Ulrich), and is best friends with Tatum, the bubbly blond sister (Rose McGowan) of Dewey (David Arquette), the goofy Sheriff's Deputy (working for a tough, small-town Sheriff, played by David's own father, Lewis Arquette). Let's see: there's also Stu (Matthew Lillard), the clueless dope that the Deputy's sister is "seeing" and Randy (Jamie Kennedy), the horror-obsessed video store geek who is like a 5th wheel hovering in orbit of the kids' universe, but who nevertheless can provide useful information about all the recognizable, tried-and-true old horror movie cliches which the young cast would do best to avoid; "There are rules for surviving a horror movie," Randy shrieks. Finally, there's Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox), who seems to have missed her natural-born calling as a meteorologist and skipped right on to tabloid TV exploitation artist. Apparently, almost a year ago to the day that the opening killing occurred (!), Sidney's mother was herself a victim of apparent rape and murder and a disturbed and angry-looking young man named Cotton Weary (Liev Schreiber) was convicted thanks in large part to Sidney's testimony. Gale continues to wonder if Cotton was the real killer and pursues Sidney as a lead to figuring out who may in fact really be behind these recent deaths; "Do you know what that would do for my book sales?", she rhetorically asks her dumbfounded cameraman (W. Earl Brown). One night, the Principal (an uncredited Henry Winkler, of TV's "Happy Days") decides to let school out early in light of a police-enforced curfew, and the bulk of the film's second half takes place at a horror movie marathon/kegger hosted by Stu and Randy. Will the Killer strike again? Wes Craven is something of a master of what is considered modern horror, or what Roger Ebert has often referred to as the "Dead Teenager Movie." The point of these movies is seemingly to entertain the audience by giving you as many gory, gruesome and vaguely funny murders of teenagers as possible - paced to be the equivalent of sex scenes in a porn film. This is different from "torture porn," however, because those films seem only designed to sicken and disgust the audience. Craven veered away from the almost torture porn nature of his terrific and scary debut, "The Last House on the Left" (1972) and his sophomore effort, "The Hills Have Eyes" (1977), and moved into supernatural horror with films like "Swamp Thing" (1982), "A Nightmare on Elm Street" (1984), which introduced the world to Freddi Krueger and a whole new horror franchise, and "The Serpent and the Rainbow" (1988), which forced Bill Pullman to deal with voodoo in Haiti. Following suit from everything ranging from John Carpenter's "Halloween" (1978) and Bob Clark's "Black Christmas" (1974) to "Prom Night" (1980), Craven and first-time screenwriter Kevin Williamson have created a virtual encyclopedia of horror movie cliches, in-jokes and even some enjoyable new ones, and have made one of the most entertaining slasher films of all time in the process.

Here is a family film that is more than the sum of its parts: it's about a boy and his dog alright, but so much more. It's about responsibility and growing up, and doing what's right - that goes for the young man in the story, as well as the grown-up adversary he's at odds with. Marty (Blake Heron) is a small-town kid who is looking for summer work. One day, he happens upon a beagel - a hunting dog that has ran away from its neglectful (and "lightly" abusive owner) Judd (the terrific Scott Wilson). Marty continues about his business, meanwhile, as the dog follows him home. Soon, he's hiding the dog in a shed and trying to keep the truth from his mean-spirited neighbor. This story, adapted from the Phyllis Reynolds Naylor book by writer-director Dale Rosenbloom, is deceptively simple, and is ever-so-slightly more layered than you expect. It's not a comedy, nor a dour drama, nor a kid's movie; it's a family film about the responsibility of young people and doing what you have to do to save someone else - in this case, a dog. This is an enjoyable little movie.

Christopher Guest's mockumentary is a hilarious send-up of small-town self-importance, show business dreamers, and boondock-dwelling country bumpkin idealism. Guest stars as Corky St. Clair, the more-than-a-little effeminate New York theatre director who has come to Blaine, Missouri with his "wife Bonnie" in order to work in an environment that won't reject him. Corky is an "old pro" whose credits include "Backdraft," a stage musical from which a local city council member recalls "You can still feel the heat!" For the "sesquecentennial" (150th Anniversary) celebration of the town's founding, Corky has written, and will produce and direct, an epic theater piece about the history of the town called "Red, White...and Blaine." He enlists an unusual cast of local, "real people" to act in his play, including old standbys Sheila and Ron Albertson (Catherine O'Hara and Fred Willard), an astonishingly deluded (and dedicated) couple of amateur actors with their sights set on Hollywood - she is "still learning" and he is just the sort of condescending man that would think he could guide her; Libby Mae Brown (Parker Posey), the local Dairy Queen worker who auditions rather suggestively with the song "Teacher's Pet;" and dentist Dr. Allan Pearl (Eugene Levy, who co-wrote the wafer-thin blueprint of a script - the film is largely improvised), an awkward, Jewish, Vaudevillean-humored wannabe comedian whose wife is heroically supportive. The cast is rounded out by would-be young star Johnny Savage (Matt Keeslar), whom Corky takes an immediate... "liking" to, and whose father does not approve, and Clifford Wooley (famed acting patriarch Lewis Arquette), the salty old narrator of the piece. The music is to be conducted by one-time director Lloyd Miller (Bob Balaban), who is all business and no pleasure and whom seems a bit resentful of Corky's taking over of the project; at a low point, after Corky tries to quit, his cast reacts to Lloyd's promotion by immediately surrounding Corky's apartment and begging him to return. Fortune shifts when a representative for a prestigious foundation is to be sent to Blaine to witness and report back about the event; could the production be headed to Broadway? The production is supported, though not too much financially, by Gwen Fabin-Blunt (Deborah Theaker), a relative of the founder of the town who was its namesake; by Mayor Glenn Welsch (Larry Miller), who likes Corky but wants to put a ceiling over his pipe dreams; and by councilman Steve Stark (Michael Hitchcock), who may reveal his own "liking" for Corky before the show is through. We learn much about the town's history, from a local historian (Don Lake) who claims it is the "stool capital of the world" thanks to a visit from an American President, as well as a dry and quirky UFO expert (David Cross); seems the town was the sight of the "first" visit from Martians (not Roswell, as is dictated by popular belief). Christopher Guest, who directed and co-wrote, was also a star and co-writer of Rob Reiner's "This Is Spinal Tap" (1984), a classic rock comedy which also took on the mockumentary-format; here, he has also wrote the music and lyrics for the film's musical numbers with Harry Shearer and Michael McKean, his bandmates and co-writers from the earlier film. Many of the film's laughs come from awkward silences, sharp one-liners, absurd humor, and yet, there's this certain off-kilter believability; Blaine's the kind of town you may be frightened to think could or does exist, yet you wouldn't be surprised to discover it did. The cast is uniformly excellent at imbuing what are essentially comic stereotypes of would-be show business people and small town lifers with a kind of almost-realism. The material, roughly sketched and then and mostly improvised, is a laugh-riot for virtually the film's entire running time from beginning to end. Oddly, I felt that the funnier bits seemed more to be found during the casting/rehearsal process than during the actual musical itself - which is very funny. You won't believe your eyes or ears, but this is a great comedic gem.

NOTE: Make sure to watch at least the beginning of the end credits for some hilarious props that Guest's character is now hocking. I can't speak for anyone else, but some would be fun to have just as curios.

Two young teenage girls lay across a bed reading "The Joy of Sex." They giggle and are grossed out, and are unaware of how joyous sex (and all that comes with it) may or may not be in the future. And so begins writer-director Nicole Holofcener's delightful, if semi-aimless, comedy about a small group of thirty-somethings in love and life in modern New York, and it's as just plain nice as can be. Catherine Keener (a Holofcener staple, turns out) stars as Amelia, an intelligent and good-looking gal who works in the Classifieds at a newspaper. Her best friend is Laura (Anne Heche), a "terrible therapist" whose boyfriend Frank (Todd Field) proposes to her, which leads them to realize just how ready for marriage they might be. Amelia once had a relationship with Andrew (Liev Schreiber), who spends perhaps more time having phone-sex with some strange woman he met in LA than he does reconnecting with his Alzheimers-afflicted father. Nowadays, Amelia is happy to go on a date to a vomitorium of a horror film with the nice, sweet movie geek (Kevin Corrigan) who asks her out. Laura and Frank have troubles, while Amelia and Andrew spend a great deal of afternoons together, recalling how they were once in love, or something like it. Meanwhile, Laura is distracted by a dorky waiter/actor who hits on her, and a sex-addict patient she'd like to take advantage of, all the while Amelia's cat Big Jeans is dying of cancer. This might sound like more plot than it really is. In her first film, Nicole Holofcener, who would go on to write and direct the wonderful "Lovely & Amazing" (2002) and the slightly less wonderful "Friends with Money" (2006), here shows a sure hand with her actors, a sweet touch with her characters and dialogue, and just enough teasings of a plot to keep you interested. I was surprised at the end, and in some sense relieved, to discover how little had really happened. Relationships are threatened and reconciled, and everyone gets what they may or may not deserve. You'll laugh right along and enjoy these people's company for the quite short 90-minute running time, and maybe that's the point.