Instead of the usual year-end complaining, let`s look for a silver lining in the Hollywood corporate fog that brought us both ”Ishtar” and ”Leonard, Part 6” in the same year.
On the bright side in 1987:
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– The price of the stock of the leading company that colors black-and-white movies plunged from $20 to $3.
– Robby Benson didn`t make a film.
– ”Lady and the Tramp” was released on videocassette, giving children another fine animated movie to watch at home instead of Saturday morning TV. And speaking of animation, Warner Bros. produced its first Daffy Duck cartoon in 19 years. It`s called ”The Duxorcist,” and it`s very funny. Here`s hoping its success prompts more cartoons.
– Robin Williams finally found a movie role worthy of his extraordinary talent. He plays a raucous military deejay in ”Good Morning, Vietnam,” which opens in much of the country on Jan. 15.
– Lillian Gish, 91, is alive and well and living on the screen in ”The Whales of August.”
Okay, now for the grumbling: Too many bad films about teenagers, too many bad films about reincarnation or time travel, too many sequels, too many simple-minded films with stories and visual strategies that belong on TV and not on the big screen. And not enough really big screens are being built! Our movies are shrinking; our movies are shrinking.
Which is why in compiling this year`s Top 10 list it was easy to pick the No. 1 film-the one film that utilized the medium to its greatest potential.
1. ”The Last Emperor” (directed by Bernardo Bertolucci): The most beautiful film of the year. The grandest vision of the year. The kind of classy film to which they used to sell reserved-seat tickets. But amid the staggering beauty of cinematographer Vittorio Storaro`s filming of imperial China, Bertolucci managed to tell a riveting personal story with far-ranging meaning-the story of an impudent little king who grows to become an adult peasant. And because the 20th Century life of the last emperor of China is a study in intellectual growth and not decay, the film argues that there is more to leadership than a throne room or an oval office.
2. ”Full Metal Jacket” (Stanley Kubrick): By comparison, ”Platoon” is a warm puppy, embracing the pain of the Vietnam grunt. Kubrick`s film distances us from its soldiers and portrays the war on an entirely different level, trying to pictorialize its grand ironies-the agony of winning; the joy of defeat. Few movie scenes of human cruelty can compare with the unbroken, dreamlike shot of the trainees pummeling Pvt. Leonard Lawrence. And never before has a rifle-killing been filmed to give us both the excitement of finding the target and the despair of seeing it-an American soldier-die.
”Full Metal Jacket” can be viewed as turning war into the visual equivalent of the monolith in Kubrick`s ”2001”-it`s ominous, and yet we rush to embrace it.
3. ”House of Games” (David Mamet): What a remarkable directing debut by playwright Mamet, who ends up serving his own script as well any director he has worked with before. On the surface, the film is made up of little tricks, little con games. But at its center, ”the house of games” in the title is not the film`s clubhouse for con artists. Rather, it`s the human mind-in this case, one belonging to a woman psychiatrist who gradually is put in touch with her dark side, which Mamet is suggesting we all have and deny at our own risk. That sentiment is not that different, by the way, from Kubrick`s attitude about the dark side of the human animal in ”Full Metal Jacket.”
4. ”Jean de Florette”/”Manon of the Spring” (Claude Berri): Two companion films that tell one story-a saga of deceit and complicity in a small French town involving the abuse of an outsider, a hunchback who doesn`t realize the true value of his rural French property. The filmmaking here is of the old style-relaxed, unforced, quiet. We feel as though we are having a grand novel read to us. Yves Montand turns in the performance of his career as the villain who conspires with his nephew against the hunchback in the first film and against the crippled man`s daughter in the second film. It`s a great salt-of-the-Earth yarn, the kind of film one is amazed to discover in 1987. See both films to appreciate the full story.
5. ”Broadcast News” (James Brooks): The easiest way to praise this film is to say how much better it is than ”Wall Street,” which seems so much more topical. But writer-director-producer Brooks has fashioned a far more sophisticated script than Oliver Stone`s ”Wall Street,” where the good guys and the bad guys are so clearly drawn. In ”Broadcast News,” especially if you see it a second time, one is more impressed with the complexity of the characters, all of whom have hidden agendas, often hidden from themselves. And although the film is very wise about changes in the TV news business, the script doesn`t depend on TV for its entertainment value. The three principal characters could be working in a department store, and they would still be fascinating. Yes, Holly Hunter is receiving all the Oscar talk, but William Hurt, as in last year`s ”Children of a Lesser God,” once again excels as an average man. How about an award for an actor who can be compelling playing a dullard?
6. ”Radio Days” (Woody Allen): The year`s funniest film, one tinged with some melancholy about time passing. Allen celebrates the grand old days of radio and mourns the loss of innocence of those days. We all have to grow up, he`s saying, and realize then that the ”Masked Avenger” hero we thrill to may be played by a short, little, insecure man. Like all of Allen`s films of late, the casting by Juliet Taylor and art direction by Santo Loquasto are impeccable.
7. ”River`s Edge” (Tim Hunter): The scariest film of the year. But this wasn`t a conventional thriller. On the contrary, it was a lazy investigation into how a bunch of high school students could ignore that one of their classmates had strangled another student and left her dead on the river`s edge. The ringleader of the students is a wild punk, but the more frightening characters are laid-back students who move in a fog without a moral compass. The greatness of the film is that it consists of more than finger-wagging at the banality of evil. It`s an indictment of the crass, mass culture that has drugged America`s youth. The film is full of references to mindless TV, the literature of today`s teenager.
8. ”Prick Up Your Ears” (Stephen Frears): Sadness is the dominant emotional color of this story, based on the life and death of rebellious English playwright Joe Orton and his homosexual companion, Kenneth Halliwell, who bludgeoned Orton to death in 1967 and then killed himself. Although the focus of the story seems to be the facile, clever Orton (author of
”Entertaining Mr. Sloane,” ”Loot”), the heart of the film belongs to Kenneth Halliwell, who embodies the whole notion of a life of quiet desperation, never tasting Joe`s success, never fitting into any group, desperately loving and wanting only a fraction of that love returned. The tragedy of the story is universal: How little it would take to change a person`s life. Alfred Molina is brilliant as Halliwell, and Gary Olman is equally fine in the flashier role as Joe.
9. ”Roxanne” (Fred Schepisi): Steve Martin combines with director Schepsi to create a romantic comedy that is delightfully off-center from the first moment we meet Martin, playing the fire chief of a nutty, contemporary Western town in which he is the only intellectual. He also possesses the town`s largest nose, which is both a source of pride and prejudice against the affection of others, including Daryl Hannah as a beautiful scientist new to town. The film is based on ”Cyrano de Bergerac,” but Martin and Schepisi can claim originality in the way the put together a town full of odd angles and even more odd supporting characters. Groucho Marx, who loved turning the world upside down, would have loved this film.
10. ”The Big Easy” (James McBride): This film qualifies for the year`s best list because it satisfies one basic test that most movies fail miserably: It presents us with characters who are at least as smart as the dumbest people we know in real life. That isn`t a back-handed compliment. Think about it:
Most writers create stupid, mechanistic characters because they are much easier to manipulate through a story. But the New Orleans detective (Dennis Quaid) and assistant district attorney (Ellen Barkin) who clash, fall in love, and clash again in ”The Big Easy” are fully developed with strengths and flaws and sides to their characters that even they may not be aware of. And the supporting cast, especially the other cops in the story, are also very smart (as supporting characters go). Additionally, director McBride, formerly a low-budget, experimental filmmaker, keeps his artistic nose clean by giving his film a wonderful sense of place and sound. This is the best behind-the-scenes New Orleans film I`ve seen.
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