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As soft and strange as a dream, *Spirited Away* is like all the wonderful children’s books that fired my imagination as a kid, before my head got saturated by fantasy clichés and almost anything could surprise and delight and startle me.
Their *Chicago* — based on the stage musical by John Kander, Fred Ebb and Bob Fosse — is utterly singable, danceable, cheerable, with musical numbers that straddle the unwillingness of today’s movie audiences to suspend our disbelief about movie characters breaking into song unless they’re Disney lions or talking candelabra.
Michael Moore is pissed off. Not exactly a newsflash, I know, but nobody is as entertaining when he’s about to bust a gut as Moore is, so his rants are always cause for celebration. Though this may only be true if you’re predisposed to agree with the substance of his rants.
Toss a coin: Which do you prefer: A Heartwarming(TM) tale of one man’s triumph over mental illness? Or one director’s biting off more than he can chew and falling rather flat on his face? Or one more mostly terrific performance from Crowe? No need to look for a three-sided coin — you get all three in A Beautiful Mind.
I’ve seen Gladiator half a dozen times now — thrice on a big screen and thrice on DVD — and it gets me deeper in the gut every time: By the time Maximus whispers his final words, assuring Lucilla that “Lucius is safe,” I’m starting to sniffle. By the time Juba is reverently burying Maximus’s totems of his wife and son, I’m bawling.
If there’s any truth to the saying that cynics are nothing but disappointed optimists, then Shrek is the very embodiment of it, its cheery and confident optimistic heart beating underneath a tough outer layer that’s grim and twisted, one that seems at first to have given up on fantasy.
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.
Is Gladiator an action movie? Is it an historical drama? Is it a sweeping epic? Yes. Like The 13th Warrior, this is a thinking person’s action movie. Like Braveheart, this is a story of a brutal era told with stunning realism. Like Terminator 2, this is a violent movie that indicts our appetite for violence. Like The Matrix, this thrills on both a visceral and cerebral level.
The Lester that American Beauty offers us at first is anything but inspirational — in fact, he may be one of the most unlikable protagonists to hit the screen in a while. A ‘horny geek boy,’ as his teenage daughter calls him, a ‘gigantic loser’ as he calls himself, Lester tells us right as the film opens that he’ll be dead in less than a year. And we don’t care.
‘Love and a bit with a dog,’ that’s all audiences want, according to Philip Henslowe (Geoffrey Rush), owner of London’s Rose Theater. A bit of romance, a bit of comedy — isn’t that really all that movie audiences, too, are after? Shakespeare in Love has both in spades, and it’s the first film of its kind to win Best Picture since 1977’s Annie Hall.
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