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Lebowski Meets Truman: Rewinding 1998
Every once in a while my brain returns to 1998, the first full year I worked as a film critic. What happens is that something will remind me of a movie that has aged particularly well, something like The Big Lebowski or A Simple Plan, and I'll notice that there were quite a lot of good movies that year, and that many of them didn't get much love at the time. But then I'll start thinking about all those movies that did get lots of love -- especially Oscar love -- and how they haven't aged well at all. By looking at the Oscars and the box office list, you'd think it was a terrible movie year, but in reality it was a great movie year. How does this happen?
One of the things I ask myself is: why wasn't Jeff Bridges nominated for Best Actor for The Big Lebowski? And come to that, why wasn't Jim Carrey nominated for the otherwise highly acclaimed and beloved The Truman Show? Or Warren Beatty for Bulworth? How about George Clooney for Out of Sight, Robert Downey Jr. for Two Girls and a Guy, or Johnny Depp for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas? Or, heck, why not the 14 year-old Eamonn Owens for his astonishing performance in The Butcher Boy? The answer is, of course, because the Academy had to make room for message movies, war movies and Holocaust movies.
Discuss: Underrated Raimi
Filed under: Action », Classics », Comedy », Horror », Romance », Sports », Thrillers », New Releases », Mystery & Suspense », Paramount », Universal », Fandom », Lists », Western »
The old-school Sam Raimi fans are having a ball this weekend (I hope) with the director's long-awaited return to horror, the very cool Drag Me to Hell. And of course all of you know Mr. Raimi as the director of the Evil Dead trilogy and / or the Spider-Man trilogy, but it's easy to forget that this filmmaker has one rather impressive batting average. Doubly so if you're into good-time matinee-style genre flicks! So here's a chance to look back over some of the man's other films, mostly ones you've heard of (and probably seen by now), but flicks that are certainly worth a fresh look every now and again. I'll start with one of my true favorites ...
The Quick and the Dead (1995) -- Raimi's ode to the old-school western is an addictively entertaining mixture of A) a great ensemble, B) tons of nifty visuals, and C) tongue-in-cheek affection for the old-fashioned western tales. Plus it's not every day you see Sharon Stone, Gene Hackman, Russell Crowe, Leonardo DiCaprio shoot it out amongst themselves. And if you're a fan of character actors, this movie is an all-you-can-eat buffet of colorful performances: Keith David, Kevin Conway, Lance Henriksen, Tobin Bell, Pat Hingle, Gary Sinise, and on and on it goes. Great fun, especially if you love westerns.
Darkman (1990) -- Long before he was handed the keys to Spidey's cinematic web, Sam Raimi was already thinking about superhero movies. And he didn't even bother going with an established character! He and his brother just created one called Darkman! Just about everything that works so well in the Spider-Man series is included here, from the playful tone and stylish action to the crafty compositions and strong performances. Liam Neeson as a faceless vigilante! How can you not love that?
From Page to Screen: 'The Ruins'
Filed under: Horror », From Page to Screen »
Warning: Some spoilers ahead. Though if you've either read the book or seen the movie, you're cool.
Order matters. It's not true what they say: that as between a book and a movie, you inevitably prefer whichever one you read or watch first. But the order you take them in nonetheless profoundly affects the experience. You can try to be objective – claim that each work has to stand or fall on its own merits, other incarnations be damned – but it won't work. You've been tainted.
I liked The Ruins – the movie. It was tight, brutal, ruthlessly effective; along with The Strangers, one of the year's few R-rated breaths of fresh air. Though it hewed pretty closely to genre conventions, it also recombined them to come up with its own interesting take on survival horror. I appreciated the movie's simplicity (the vines are a pure, almost elemental villain); its gruesomeness that never turned into sadism or needless cruelty; its grim, harsh relentlessness. It was a gripping roller coaster of a movie; a fun ride I enjoyed, praised, and pretty much put out of my mind.
Now that I've read the book, I ask myself: Would I still have liked the movie had I gone to the book first? The answer, I think, is no. It's not that I now think I was wrong about the film; to the contrary. But Scott Smith's novel is so extraordinary a genre achievement that the movie – adapted by Smith himself – can, in retrospect, feel only like a hapless abridgement, a wispy simulacrum of the novel's all-encompassing sense of doom and spiraling psychological terror. Taking the two in reverse order would have made the film feel cheap, impotent, lame; The Ruins for Dummies.
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