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The script may be a mess, but to be fair to Pullman, it is nicely directed. It’s probably hard to shoot an ugly movie in gorgeous Big Sky country (Alberta stands in for Wyoming here), but vast locations like this can be greatly diminished on television. Pullman, though, eschews static shots of beautiful scenery and keeps his camera moving over his boundless outdoors settings.
Like Nigel Tufnel’s amp, this one goes to 11. I agonized over this, trying to whittle down a list of about 25 great movies of 1999 to a mere 10, and I just couldn’t go that far. It pained me to eliminate some wonderful — and wonderfully adult — dramas from the list. The Cider … more…
It’s no Braveheart, but while I wait for The Patriot, The Crossing is a tasty appetizer. Sure and steady, this stately original film from the A&E cable network focuses on a brief moment of the seven-year-long war for American independence: the Battle of Trenton, when the commander-in-chief of the Continental Army, George Washington, averted the imminent end of the colonial rebellion and handed the enemy his first defeat.
Snow Falling on Cedars, then, is the story of Ishmael’s reluctant journey to become a man of compassion and fairness, as he finds himself having to decide whether the bitterness he feels over Hatsue’s rejection of him will stand in the way of correcting an injustice he is in a position to affect. It’s a very interior story, and probably not one that anyone could easily adapt for the screen.
Tobey Maguire is rapidly becoming one of my favorite young actors. His remarkably expressive face has done him great service so far with his characters, who’ve tended to be naive boys who get their eyes abruptly and unpleasantly opened, as in Ride with the Devil and Pleasantville. It remains to be seen whether he’ll be able to make the transition to more adult characters, but I’d lay odds that he’ll do just fine: The Cider House Rules is a step in that direction for him.
I have a gut feeling that The Nightmare Before Christmas may be the movie closest to Burton’s subconscious. This Edward Gorey phantasm of a film, I think, is Burton’s id come to life.
The king of 80s teen angst, John Hughes will be forever be venerated by Gen-Xers as the writer/director of our Holy Flick: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. But his favorite movie with the rest of the world is probably Home Alone, which Hughes wrote. One indication, admittedly drawn from an extremely tiny sampling of moviewatchers: To this day, ten years after the release of the biggest-grossing film of 1990, my mother — who tends to refer to actors as ‘the guy from that TV show’ or ‘the one who was married to that other one in that movie’ — calls Macaulay Culkin, adoringly, ‘Home Alone.’
Edward Scissorhands is an anti-Christmas movie, I suppose. Here we have a creature whose “handicap” separates him from human contact — the scars on his face attest to the fact that he can’t even touch himself. At the time of year when the ideas of spreading cheer and opening our hears are meant to be the dominant ones, the “good” people of an all-American suburbia reject his plea for love and companionship, and cast him out.
Maybe because A Christmas Story, based on writings by humorist Jean Shepherd, concerns itself with the universalities of childhood, at least as it existed in America in the 20th century. From the mysteries of life — like, Does a human tongue stick to a frozen flag pole? — to the ‘unthinkable disasters’ of youth that are hilarious in adult retrospect, A Christmas Story taps into the bewildered and not-so-innocent child still in all of us.
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