The third list to be posted, in a series of six. –J.R.
Chicago Reader, 1990 (ranked):
Sweetie (Jane Campion)
City of Sadness (Hou Hsiao-hsien)
To Sleep With Anger (Charles Burnett)
White Hunter, Black Heart (Clint Eastwood)
The Icicle Thief (Maurizio Nichetti)
Pump Up the Volume (Allan Moyle)
The Plot Against Harry (Michael Roemer)
Texasville (Peter Bogdanovich)
Mr. Hoover and I (Emile De Antonio)
tied: The Freshman (Andrew Bergman), Miami Blues (George Armitage)
Chicago Reader, 1991:
L’Atalante (restoration)(Jean Vigo)
An Angel at My Table (Jane Campion)
White Dog (Samuel Fuller)
Ju Dou (Zhang Yimou)
My Own Private Idaho (Gus Van Sant)
Chameleon Street (Wendell B. Harris, Jr.)
Europa Europa (Agnieszka Holland)
Camp Thiaroye (Ousmane Sembene)
Hangin’ With the Homeboys (Joseph P. Vasquez)
For the Boys (Mark Rydell)
Chicago Reader, 1992:
A Tale of the Wind (Joris Ivens)
Actress (Stanley Kwan)
Rhapsody in August (Akira Kurosawa)
Close-Up (Abbas Kiarostami) + Life and Nothing More (Abbas Kiarostami)
The Famine Within (Katherine Gilday)
Rock Hudson’s Home Movies (Mark Rappaport)
Naked Lunch (David Cronenberg)
Close My Eyes (Stephen Poliakoff)
La Belle Noiseuse (Jacques Rivette)
Chicago Reader, 1993:
Nouvelle Vague (Jean-Luc Godard)
The Puppet Master (Hou Hsiao-hsien)
Night and Day (Chantal Akerman) + From the East (Chantal Akerman)
Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg)
Bitter Moon (Roman Polanski)
The Story of Qiu Ju (Zhang Yimou)
The Passing (Bill Viola) +
Histoire(s)du Cinéma (Jean-Luc Godard)
Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (Mark Achbar/Peter Wintonick) + It’s All True: Based on an Unfinished Film by Orson Welles (R. Read more
Written for FIPRESCI, specifically for their web site,from Seattle. –J.R.
The Undermining of Intimacy: Home and Everyone Else
By Jonathan Rosenbaum
As different as they are in other respects, one interesting facet shared by two tragicomic European features included in the New Directors Showcase at the Seattle International Film Festival, Ursula Meier’s Home (2008) and Maren Ade’s Alle Anderen (Everyone Else, 2009), is that they both show the gradual deterioration of intimate relationships that starts to occur between or among individuals in isolation from “everyone else”, after they start to become less isolated. In both cases, contact with the outside world seems to operate as a kind of contamination, although the possibility is posed in each case that the
sickness is already present from the outset, but needs the objectification provided by the outside world in order to become fully evident.
Meier’s Home, a second feature, introduces us to an eccentric but lovingly and happily close-knit family living in the country next to an unfinished superhighway — mother (Isabelle Huppert), father (Olivier Gourmet), older daughter (Adéläide Leroux), younger daughter (Madeleine Budd), and son (Kacey Mottet Klein) — who are gradually driven bonkers by the sound, pollution, and lack of privacy brought by passing vehicles once the superhighway opens. Read more
A corporate mogul from Wall Street (Richard Gere) rents, woos, and wows a street hooker from Hollywood Boulevard (Julia Roberts) in this 1990 romantic comedy, which proves that the Disney people can sell just about anythingincluding a misogynistic celebration of big business and prostitution. In this case, prostitution’s OK because the hooker’s a likable bimbo who works without a pimp or a boss, grateful for the little crumbs of high culture the suave company buster can sweep her way, and perfectly willing to offer a little therapy for his patriarchal hang-ups in return. He pays her $3,000 and they fall in loveain’t Hollywood grand? Garry Marshall directed a script by J.F. Lawton; with Ralph Bellamy, Jason Alexander, and Laura San Giacomo. 117 min. (JR) Read more
