1990's Countdown Group Watch

Arizona Dream

I'm glad this title was included here.
Probably Kusturica's best work in the universal meaning, considering his other master works too local (South-Eastern Europe).
Remarkable film work. Vincent Gallo appearance in the movie is taken around here as absolute cult status.
As for the music...wow!

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"Population don't imitate art, population imitate bad television." W.A.
"You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus." M.T.

Arizona Dream
(Emir Kusturica, 1994)

Well, that was... something. Unfortunately it was not something I particularly enjoyed. It had a few moments that I found mildly amusing, but overall it just had too much weirdness for the sake of weirdness and not enough that I could really invest in. Depp looked great though so it at had that going for it.

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Randomizer chose me. I'll give it a think and post something later.

Arizona Dream felt like a movie that had potential, but it had too much stuff that didn't work for me. I kind of liked the relationship between Axel and Elaine, but I didn't like most of the other characters. I've never been a fan of Jerry Lewis in anything I've seen him in, and this movie was no different. Most of the surreal parts were too weird for me, and I disliked the North By Northwest scene.

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If I answer a game thread correctly, just skip my turn and continue with the game.
OPEN FLOOR.

Lili Taylor.



Along with Parker Posey and Jennifer Jason Leigh, she is probably THE Indie actress in the 1990s, when the American Independent film scene was at its zenith. First known for two strong roles at the end of the 1980s, as one of the three female leads along with Julia Roberts and Annabeth Gish in Mystic Pizza (1988) and then as the perpetually depressed but supportive friend to John Cusack's Lloyd Dobbler in Say Anything... (1989).



And then the 1990s hit, and she was an absolute superstar...in the Indie film scene. She has never been nominated for an Oscar but she was nominated for four Independent Spirit Awards, winning one, all in the 1990s. Right out of the gate she was strong in the road movie Bright Angel (1990), co-starring Dermot Mulroney (with Sam Shepard, Valerie Perrine, Mary Kay Place, Bill Pullman, Kevin Tighe, Delroy Lindo, etc.) and flat-out amazing in Nancy Sevoca's Dogfight (1991). In that one River Phoenix stars as a 1963 Marine recruit about to go off to Vietnam who is playing a cruel game where each Marine is supposed to bring the ugliest girl they can find as a date, the title "dogfight". But the girl's don't know that is the purpose. Taylor's waitress is who River chooses, though once he gets to know her better he has second thoughts about the mean trick. Terrific movie, two amazing performances. Got universally great reviews...and nobody saw it. Even for River it was eclipsed by My Own Private Idaho, released the same year. And of course River died in '93.




Lili's character in Arizona Dream (1993) is just so two-dimensionally wacky. There is no even accidental reality at all in it, and Lili is so very excellent at portraying real, vulnerable, complicated, strong characters. A suicidal flake who wants to be reincarnated as a turtle is something from a bad round of improv class.



Lily was in THREE other films released in 1993. I like all of them better than Arizona Dream, especially looking at Taylor's performances. Watch It is a slight but earnest piece with four twentysomething male friends (Peter Gallagher, Tom Sizemore, John C. McGinley, and Jon Tenney) who need to quickly learn to treat women as more than just sport, and Lili gets most of the best lines. Household Saints, directed by the same woman who made Dogfight, a multi-generational tale of an Italian-American family, starting with the wedding of Joseph & Catherine (Vincent D'Onofrio & Tracey Ullman), then Taylor as their teenage daughter obsessed with becoming a nun and then canonized as a Saint...only to have that challenged when a boy enters the picture (Michael Imperioli). Great, underseen movie.




But the masterpiece Lili Taylor was part of in 1993 was in the astounding ensemble of Robert Altman's Short Cuts. Altman's adaptation of several Raymond Carver short stories, re-set in Los Angeles with a overlapping characters. Lili Taylor's storyline has her and her husband (Robert Downey Jr.) involved with some neighbors (Jennifer Jason Leigh & Chris Penn) who are sort of new friends, but Taylor is also the daughter of Lily Tomlin's waitress who has a tempestuous relationship with her limo driver boyfriend, played by Tom Waits. THAT is the 1993 movie featuring Lili Taylor everyone should see at least once.





After that banner year, Taylor continued to shine in another who's who ensemble in Alan Rudolph's Algonquin Roundtable pic Mrs. Parker & the Vicious Circle (1994), again with Jennifer Jason Leigh (as Dorothy Parker), then as a contemporary vampire in Abel Ferrara's stylish The Addiction (1995). In 1996 she had two more indie classics, the first Girls Town is a very honest and insightful look at four young women about to finish high school, with Lili playing the unwed mother of the group, and in Mary Harron's I Shot Andy Warhol she plays the real-life Valerie Solanas, a radical feminist who was briefly part of Warhol's (played by Jared Harris) Factory orbit who became angrier and angrier when she begins to irrationally focus on Warhol as the root of her problems. She did attempt to assassinate him in 1968, critically injuring him. The narrative is told from her frantic, fractured point of view.



She got to play lighter comedy again in Stanley Tucci's throwback 1930s farce The Impostors (1998) starring Tucci and Oliver Platt with a truly all-star cast including everyone from Hope Davis and Allison Janney to Alfred Molina and Steve Buscemi to Cambell Scott and Tony Shalhoub to Billy Connolly and Richard Jenkins to Isabella Rossellini and Woody Allen! Seriously. One of @Yoda's favorites, BTW.



Lili also had a couple mainstream roles in the later part of the 1990s, a nice little supporting part as one of the kidnappers in Ron Howard's Ransom (1996) and then co-starring in the much-anticipated and very disappointing remake of The Haunting (1999) with Liam Neeson, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Owen Wilson, and Bruce Dern.

I am not surprised you were drawn to Lili Taylor on screen, but I urge you to check out many of these other films where I think she is much, much better than the silly part in Arizona Dream.

Of course, your mileage may vary.

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"Film is a disease. When it infects your bloodstream it takes over as the number one hormone. It bosses the enzymes, directs the pineal gland, plays Iago to your psyche. As with heroin, the antidote to Film is more Film." - Frank Capra

Very helpful and interesting post, thanks.

Although I do recognise her now, this does identify a blind spot in my viewing, and it's a particular oversight that I haven't watched Short Cuts, not least because I do like Altman's films. Am watching it now.

I first watched this movie like 25 years ago when I was exploring Russell Crowe's work after being mesmerized by him in Gladiator. He did a lot of movies in the 90s and I'm sure will make an appearance on the countdown with L.A. Confidential, but I think this movie showcases his best work of the decade.

Here's what I wrote when I rewatched it a few weeks ago:

I suspected before I watched it that Romper Stomper wasn't going to be my kind of movie, but I didn't realize how much it wasn't going to be my kind of movie. It was way too violent and offensive. The skinheads were just beating people up for no reason other than that they were different from them.

I thought it might not be too bad because I vaguely remember watching American History X for a HoF a while back, and even though that wasn't my type of movie either, it was at least a movie that I could respect, and even kind of liked. But Romper Stomper was just brutal to watch.

@gbgoodies

I applaud you for giving it a try, at least.

@gbgoodies will choose the next movie.

Hopefully we actually get some participation in the next round.

I was hoping that more people would have watched it so there would have been some better reviews for you, but I guess people were too busy this week.

Thank you. I sent my nom. I picked a movie that's filled with laughs and a lot of fun.

I chose Noises Off... (1992) because it's a very funny movie with a fantastic cast. My favorite scenes are the backstage scenes, after we've seen the first act from the audience's point of view, when we get to see the cast really shine as the characters deal with their issues backstage while the play is being performed on stage. They have to keep quiet so they don't disturb the performance and it just becomes complete chaos.

I really hope that I can find room for this movie on my list. It's one of my favorite comedies.

Ooh, I love Noises Off. The cast is excellent. I'm not the biggest fan of the framing device and the voiceover, but the dedication to the physical comedy makes it such a fun watch.

Here's my review from a little while back:

Peter Bogdanovich's Noises Off!, adapted from the 1982 play, is a classic farce, deconstructed. Farce is a stage genre unto itself, not just a comedy but one full of physical gags built around mistaken identities and misunderstandings, all played at an exaggerated, over-the-top pitch. Most of the early classic Marx Brothers movies are all farcical plots, Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not To Be (1942), Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot (1959), and perhaps the easiest, purest example is Frank Capra's Arsenic & Old Lace (1944). The play-within-the-play in Noises Off! is a fictional British piece called Nothing On, a single-set bit of mayhem at a cottage involving an old housekeeper, two different sets of couples, and a burglar, all of whom initially believe they are the only ones in the house, with nearly identical sets of luggage and plates of sardines being the props that keep disappearing and reappearing. It is all about fast-paced timing, with essentially each time a door closes and a character exits another one opens bringing somebody else back on stage.

We see only the first act of this play performed, but three different times. The first is the final dress rehearsal, the night before the initial out-of-town opening in Des Moines, Iowa. Michael Caine plays the director of the play and we meet the cast as their on stage and off-stage characters. Carol Burnett is the veteran star, playing the housekeeper, John Ritter and Nicollette Sheridan play the first couple, a real estate agent pretending the house is his for an illicit afternoon rendezvous, Christopher Reeve and Marliu Henner are the second couple, the rightful owners who are attempting to lay low as they dodge a large tax payment, and Denholm Elliott is the burglar. There is also a stage manager, Julie Haggerty, and a stage hand, Mark Lin-Baker. As they suffer through the dress rehearsal we also learn that Burnett and Ritter's characters are having a backstage love affair, and Caine is trying to woo Sheridan, though Haggerty is his ex. Oh, and Elliott's character is a notorious drunk.



That first time through the first act we learn the basic moves each character is supposed to make on stage, as well as the personality flaws of each actor that may prevent them from performing well. The second time through it is months later in Miami and we watch things unfold mostly backstage, but the various romantic entanglements have shifted causing tension and outright sabotage, leading to a performance that mostly seems to come off if you were an audience member but is a mess behind the set, with all of the jealous actions having to be done almost entirely without dialogue, since the play is running. Our third time through Act One is in Cleveland, the final stop before the Broadway opening, and we watch mostly from the audience perspective. But this time absolutely everything goes wrong.

Farce is intended to be played way over-the-top, and especially in the Miami performance it is cranked up even higher due to the condition of silence backstage, with even more cartoonish miming. If you like this style of comedy, which in its distilled, dumbest-down form would be a typical "Three's Company" sitcom episode, you will likely go with it and find the sight gags and frantic pace to be amusing. If you require a more modern sensibility this will likely be torture. Each character, by design, is only a two-dimensional archetype, and that goes for both the on-stage and off-stage versions of each character. There is more mugging going on than a New York City subway car in the 1970s.



Peter Bogdanovich had one of the most impressive beginnings to a career in Hollywood history, starting with his sly and clever Targets (1968), a Roger Corman quicky that is much more than the sum of its parts, then the back-to-back-to-back smash successes of The Last Picture Show (1971), What's Up, Doc? (1972), and Paper Moon (1973), three masterpieces. As seemingly easy and surefire as those three projects had been, his next three were unmitigated disasters - financially, critically, and artistically. While he never again matched the success of those first three flicks, he had minor ups and downs in the 1980s and into the 1990s, interrupted by a tragedy when his girlfriend Dorothy Stratten was infamously and brutally murdered.

Noises Off! is nowhere near the bottom of his filmography with the true duds like Daisy Miller (1974), At Long Last Love (1975), or Illegally Yours (1988), but it sure ain't Paper Moon, either. The deconstruction element of Noises Off! is very clever and fun if you see it performed live, but the film version is a bit doomed to be flatter, with things like cutting to close ups distracting from the pace, not quickening nor enhancing it. Which isn't to say it isn't fun, it just isn't the kind of sustained insanity of What's Up, Doc? or the classic farces and bygone Screwball comedies.

Some more screencaps...

Noises Off is great fun. Cannot recommend it enough.

And if you love that, you should definitely checkout "The Play That Goes Wrong" in one or all of its various incarnations. It's a stage play, setup like a bog standard locked room murder mystery, except that's only the ostensible premise: the actual premise is that the production-within-the-production goes horribly awry in lots of creative and inventive ways. Some you'll see coming...some you definitely will not.

You can see it live off-Broadway (fantastic in person), or you can find videos of various television adaptations. Not of the play directly, but the same idea across other faux plays. You might want to start with the initial special, Peter Pan Goes Wrong, which is free (!) on YouTube:


(It will probably make you watch it on YouTube directly, in which case, you can click here.)

This was such a hit they ordered a show based on the premise, naturally titled The Goes Wrong Show, which ran for 12 episodes over two seasons. All the episodes are good, and some (like the courtroom drama) are actually better than the special that spawned them.

I'll probably get a telling off for this, but other recommended films involving plays:

A list
Story of the Last Chrysanthemum (1939)
Floating Weeds (1959)
The Travelling Players (1975)

B list
Twentieth Century (1934)
Les Enfants du Paradise (1945)
Le Dernier Metro (1980)