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The Meanspirit of the Season When the sticky-sweet sentiments of the season threaten to send into a diabetic coma and you’re ready to take hostages if you hear that Muzak rendition of “Jingle Bell Rock” over the mall loudspeaker system one more goddamn time, then you are ready for the twisted and profane Beavis & … more…
Uplifting and unsentimental, with a fresh and warm appreciation for the eccentricities that make life interesting, this is probably the most charming movie about death that’s ever been made.
Christopher Guest’s Best in Show is another hilarious and poignant mockumentary that, in the vein of his Waiting for Guffman, pokes gentle fun at its fictional subjects as well its audience.
Annie Wilkes is King’s best psycho and one of the most banally malevolent visions of evil ever depicted onscreen — as played by the extraordinary Kathy Bates, she is a terror of frighteningly everyday proportions. A lonely, abandoned woman living in the Colorado mountains, her greatest solace comes from the romance novels of author Paul Sheldon (James Caan), all of which feature an heroine with the unlikely name of Misery.
Kinda cheap-looking and with a quasi-indie, ‘who gives a shit if we ever make any money’ attitude that Miramax and The Blair Witch Project have all but wiped from the face of studio filmmaking, 1984’s Repo Man reminds us that once, not so long ago, weird-ass movies were not verboten in Hollywood. Deadpan humor, throwaway visual jokes, and oblique political and social satire may have doomed this way-cool flick to the neverland of sci-fi cultdom, but it has good company there, like its similarly themed contemporaries The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai and the TV series Max Headroom.
Was American Beauty the single best film of 1999? I can’t decide. The second time I watched the film, on a widescreen video screener after it won the Oscar for Best Picture, I thought with horror: I named this sitcom one of my best films of the year? On a third viewing, also on the small screen, I saw once again all the brilliance that I saw the first time around, and more.
Opens with Hitchcockian strings warp-warping as sticky red blood drips down a white screen… or is it blood? This touch of black whimsy isn’t the only one to be found here…
So, Go’s three interconnected tales follow a diverse group of Los Angeles twentysomethings as their lives bang up against one another in a scenario that’s the 90s in a nutshell, from the Xer point of view: sex and danger that’s both exciting and terrifying (the clever script uses the word ‘go’ both in the imperative, let’s-get-out-of-here sense and also in the imperative, orgasmic sense, as a synonym for ‘come’). And is if to demonstrate typical Xer cynicism, it all happens while holly jolly Christmas passes by practically unnoticed in the background.
In fact, Dickens might have written something like Scrooged, an 80s, greed-isn’t-good update of the Dickens classic. The wittiest satire of television since Network, Scrooged gives us Frank Cross (Bill Murray: cradle, rushmore), the ‘youngest president in the history of television,’ the maniacal — and megalomanaical — head of the IBC TV network.
Okay, so it’s not a movie. But Blackadder’s Christmas Carol is my favorite variation on the beloved Charles Dickens story of one man’s dramatic change of heart. Remember, though, dear reader, to take into account that I am a heartless bitch — anyone with an ounce of sentiment will be thoroughly appalled by this entirely mean-spirited black comedy.
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