OT: The Onion's AVClub's 1997 week

The first articles seem to rather fully envelop us in EVERYTHING from 1997, but I gotta go with the movies, and only(as always from me) in the "mainstream American tradition":

Titanic
LA Confidential
Boogie Nights
Jackie Brown
Face Off
As Good As It Gets

That's quite a mix. For me, its LA Confidential all the way as the winner from 1997...its the last movie(20 years now) that I fell in obsessive love with rather than just enjoyed. I'm STILL trying to figure out why. Some of it is who I saw it with and when and where; its rather like Psycho -- "My LA Confidential is not YOUR LA Confidential."

But I think LAC plays strongly to these likings of mine:

Hitchcockian craftsmanship -- everything looks good, there's no hand-held raggedness to it.

Hitchcockian screenwriting -- intricate but simple, great dialogue, great surprises, ever-building suspense.

NON-Hitchcockian "realism": Here is a movie about the interrelationship of Anglo-Americans, African-Americans and Mexican-Americans in 1953 Los Angeles that has a sort of "pox on all your houses" cynicism attached (see also: The Hateful Eight) even as the film concurrently studies the levels of "entertainment" coming out of Hollywood in that era: movies, TV, gossip industry, elegant Hollywood hookers(straight and gay). And its a mob movie, too, with a touch of The Untouchables(though THESE untouchables are tainted, indeed.)

I don't necessarily accept the racial tensions laid out in LAC as "inevitable," but the film says: "They are there, they were always there, we've got to work past them." The film has some Psycho-like narrative shocks along the way but ultimately pulls out a surprise "happy ending" that I value greatly. Life doesn't ALWAYS end like Chinatown.

Great cast, if almost all male(that's why Kim Basinger won the sole Oscar for acting, among other reasons, including: she's good.) Kevin Spacey's greatest role.

They controversially rate Jackie Brown, Face/Off, and over-wrought French movie-insider vampire flick, Irma Vep ahead of more obvious, near-perfect choices like LA Confidential, Boogie Nights, and The Sweet Hereafter.

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I hear you on these things, but I guess once lists are made..the debate begins.

I had a huge rush of nostalgia as I viewed that list because doggone...I saw pretty much every American film on it. I was obviously a bigger movie goer then, than now. This was specifically connected to my significant other of the time, a person who seems to have required two or more movies a week to be seen, I happily went along.

Two on the list I forgot about:

Grosse Pointe Blank: John Cusack was almost a star for awhile, and this is my favorite of his films. He co-wrote it with a mordant, fast-talking wit. He gets to act with his sister, Joan as his long-suffering secretary to his peculiar line of work: hit man.

This hit man goes to his ten-year high school reunion and the great joke is: nobody CARES that he's a hit man ("Oh, that's interesting.") Meanwhile, as a minor miracle: Dan Ackroyd is actually funny again in this film. I mean, hilarious, his old rapid-talking robo-man self. He's a crazed hit man who wants to form a "hit man union," to which Cusack replies, "But we're LONE gunmen." The scene where Cusack and Ackroyd have a conversation over breakfast that escalates into gun-pulling profane stand-off makes me laugh, as does this accusation by Cusack that Ackroyd is working with the Feds:

Ackroyd: Me?
Cusack: Yes.
Ackroyd: Go G?
Cusack: Yes.
Ackroyd: On YOU?
Cusack: Yes!
Ackroyd: Never!

Rat a tat tat.

As "explanation" for Cusack's hit man career, we meet his parents: (1) Dad is dead in a grave; Cusack pours whiskey on the grave in respect -- the man must have been an alky; (2) Mom is alive and in a mental institutution...and played by Madame Blanche herself, Barbara Harris(her last role?)

And I like Cusack's line to the girlfriend he's trying to win back(Minnie Driver) about how as a hitman, he only kills bad people:

"You should have seen the resumes on these people. It was like a DEMON's resume!"

QT picks 'My Best Friend's Wedding' as his #2 which seems utterly perverse for him in the year of Boogie Nights and LA Confidential (was he trying at the time rather sourly to throw attention away from his close close competition - I tend to think that Hitchcock did a bit of this sometimes).

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Yes, Hitchcock was pretty good at pretending not to have seen or known about or cared about thrillers made by competitors.

The closest I ever saw was two comments he made(in separate interviews) about Jaws:

"Oh, yes, the big fish picture. It was quite good." (And that's as good as it got with Hitchocck.)

"Look at this poor Spielberg fellow. He makes the biggest hit of all time. How can he top that?" Hitchcock was thinking of his experience with Psycho, little knowing that the "age of genre blockbusters" was upon us and Spielberg would match or exceed Jaws many more times(but not THAT many more times: ET and Jurassic Park; Close Encounters and Raiders -- not all of them made Jaws money.)

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QT in 1997 gave us Jackie Brown, which pushes hard against Pulp Fiction as my favorite QT. It is easily the NICEST QT movie, even as many characters die. A lot of people -- me included -- see this as QT's "Rio Bravo" -- a long, talky comfortable movie that never feels OVERlong, with a focus on middle-aged people who have lived life.

But Jackie Brown had tough competition. Titanic blew everything away, leaving Jackie Brown to fight it out with LA Confidential, Boogie Nights and "As Good As It Gets" as the "IT movies" of the year. Only the first two were in QT's wheelhouse.

As for "My Best Friend's Wedding." I always thought the quasi-musical inclusion of a Burt Bacharach singalong("I Say a Little Prayer for You" in a fish restaurant) and Julia's gay male friend (so witty, so supportive) took that one over the top. The story was rather painful, I thought, and I've just never taken to Julia Roberts "style"(alternating big teeth and righteous anger.)

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