The Devil's Own (1997)

Film: The Devil's Own (1997)

Stars: Harrison Ford, Brad Pitt, Margaret Colin, Ruben Blades, Treat Williams, George Hearn

Director: Alan J. Pakula

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Harrison Ford: click here to learn more about Mr. Ford (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

By the late 1990's, Harrison Ford was almost sixty years old, and despite decades of action films, he was starting to show that age.  Instead of playing young rebels & sexy professors onscreen, he was playing the president in movies like Air Force One.  Ford was still an incredibly bankable star (Air Force One was a huge hit & would have long pop culture legs-it's still one of the films that's most name-checked for him), but it was also obvious that gravy train was about to end, and you see that in a film like The Devil's Own released in the same year.  Ford himself had seen a previous generation's action hero serve as his mentor in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade with Sean Connery playing his father as Connery's career had started to fade.  Here, he was now taking over the father figure role, and young Brad Pitt is the sexy upstart who is at the center of the film even if Harrison Ford gets top billing.  The result is a movie that doesn't really work, and would unfortunately be the harbinger of a lot of Ford films to come.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Frankie McGuire (Pitt), a member of the IRA (Irish Republican Army) who saw his father gunned down for sympathizing with the republicans in the 1970's, and has now joined them & is trying to buy missiles in the United States.  He does so by staying with an NYPD Sergeant Tom O'Meara (Ford), and his family, and we get a few cute scenes where Frankie & Tom bond over shooting pool (and his daughters all develop schoolgirl crushes on the comely Frankie).  But the movie takes a dark turn when the actual task at-hand, buying the missiles from a violent Irish mobster named Billy Burke (Williams) starts to end in bloodshed.  The film becomes a standoff between Frankie, who inadvertently has made Tom's family the target of violent criminals, and Tom himself, now trying to save Frankie as he knows he's headed for either prison or death at this point.

The film's politics are a bit hard to decipher, and haven't aged super well.  The Good Friday Agreements that would happen the following year make trying to decipher which side you were on very different than in the 1990's when the violence in Ireland would've been on the nightly news regularly (I would assume a lot of modern audiences wouldn't entirely know what to do with Pitt's character here).  The film also glorifies the "honest cop" who still lies to get his partner off for murder, and Ford's character in an era were law enforcement is not universally shorthand for being the "good guys" is a bit tough, and honestly indicates in part why the action genre struggled to stay super relevant into the 21st Century.  This bit also feels tagged on, which if you read about the behind-the-scenes drama of this movie, it was (and caused friction between Ford & Pitt, who would never work together again).

But the bigger problem might be the film gets really dull after a while.  There's not enough new here-the film could've used more scenes with the two men together, having them play off of one another and giving us a better sense of their relationship before they start pointing guns at the other guy.  Much has been made about Pitt's (shaky) Irish accent through the years for this film, and I'm not going to pretend it's good, but Pitt is so beautiful and so easy onscreen I don't really care that he doesn't sound super authentic.  Ford, as well, is a solid leading man but he doesn't take to the complicated aspects of the film, and is too stoic compared to Pitt, and honestly (in my opinion) gets outplayed by him.  Ford is so serious that he borders on two-dimensional.  Gone is the easy charm of Indiana Jones and Star Wars, and we don't have the thrills & stakes of something like The Fugitive (nor the actorly sophistication of The Conversation or The Mosquito Coast).

This would in part be the future of Harrison Ford as he would continue to work.  With the exception of What Lies Beneath (I wish he'd done more horror in his career, as this film is terrific), the next few years would be a series of missteps, critically & financially, even in the action genre with pictures like Firewall and K-19: The Widowmaker (I actually saw this in theaters, making me one of the few who did, and found my ticket stub for it randomly the other day...if my brother makes it this far in the review, curious if he remembers which theater we saw this in).  Much of the next few decades would involve revisiting roles (to differing success) in the Star Wars, Blade Runner, & Indiana Jones franchises, but by-and-large, Ford would never really recapture the glamour of either his action hero heyday nor of his unique acting ability in auteur-driven dramas, and in the past few years his best work has been in television.

Next month, we're going to shift to an actor who was very much Ford's action star peer, and like Ford would end up watching his once impenetrable action hero career go down in flames in the late 1990's.  But while Ford would go on to middling success in a series of notable flops, this actor would encounter a second act so unlikely, it would've been scoffed had it been in one his movies (proving that occasionally, truth IS stranger than fiction).

Conspiracy Theory (1997)

Film: Conspiracy Theory (1997)

Stars: Mel Gibson, Julia Roberts, Patrick Stewart

Director: Richard Donner

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2024 (and now 2025) Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the women who were once crowned as "America's Sweethearts" and the careers that inspired that title (and what happened when they eventually lost it to a new generation).  This month, our focus is on Julia Roberts: click here to learn more about Ms. Roberts (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

You'll notice above that Mel Gibson got top billing over Julia Roberts, and that's not a mistake, nor is it sexism.  Headed into 1997, Gibson was the far bigger star of the two.  Gibson was finishing up a decade-long run as one of the biggest stars in America, including nabbing a pair of Oscars for the box office smash Braveheart, and was indisputably one of the most bankable actors in Hollywood.  Julia Roberts, as we discussed last week, had not had a proper hit since 1993's The Pelican Brief.  But that was about to change in 1997, when Roberts would stage one of the most impressive runs in Hollywood history.  You could argue, quite frankly, that Conspiracy Theory isn't a good enough example of this era, but because these movies are so ubiquitous it's the only one that qualifies for this series because it's the only one I haven't seen.

It started out with the romantic scheming of My Best Friend's Wedding, a huge comeback vehicle that out-earned the far more expensive Speed 2: Cruise Control which opened a week earlier (starring Roberts' then rom-com rival Sandra Bullock).  In the years that followed, she would continue to invest in the bread-and-butter that had launched her stardom, alternating between female-driven dramas and romantic-comedies like Stepmom, Runaway Bride, Notting Hill, and 2000's Erin Brockovich which finally won her an Oscar.  Roberts would come out swinging after securing an Academy Award with a trio of hits in 2001 (The Mexican, America's Sweethearts, & Ocean's Eleven).  Nine hit movies, most of them liked by critics, in the span of five years...America's Sweetheart had come back from potential footnote status and was once again the most bankable (and highest-paid) actress in Hollywood.

(Spoilers Ahead) But we have a movie to discuss, and it's a weird one in this list, though it does put Roberts in a romance with a big-name leading man.  Jerry Fletcher (Gibson) is a taxi driver who spends his days spouting crackpot theories to his ambivalent customers, and then goes home to a claustrophobic apartment filled with locks, newspaper clippings, and countless copies of The Catcher in the Rye (side note-I am in love with what they do with Gibson's apartment in this movie, and think it does SUCH good work in helping you get to know a sometimes underwritten character...kudos).  His only friend is Alice Sutton (Roberts), a Justice Department lawyer who has a soft spot for him because he once saved her life.  But a third of the way through the movie, he's kidnapped and tortured by Jonas (Stewart), a man channeling Laurence Olivier in Marathon Man who works for some covert organization we (along with Jerry & Alice) try to understand.

Here's the thing about Conspiracy Theory-it doesn't make a lot of sense.  The twists aren't particularly interesting decades later, when the idea of a man making up lies about the government feels less like that one uncle at Thanksgiving everyone tries not to sit next to and more like your congressman talking on Fox News.  Combine that with the role being played by Mel Gibson, an actor that, even if you're a fan of his (separate-the-artist-from-his) work, it's hard not to see the real life parallels that 1997 audiences wouldn't have caught yet, and you have a film that flirts with unlikable and convoluted for stretches of its (too long) runtime.

But I did like it, and I think that has to do with the way that the film centers around Roberts & Gibson's ample chemistry.  In a modern film like this, they'd be friends, but because a thriller starring two attractive people in the 1990's is going to have them kiss, we get a romance, and this makes it far more enjoyable.  Even if you struggle to root for Jerry, cheering on Alice is easy, and you learn to love that Jerry is the good kind of bad-for-her.  This is the sort of movie that doesn't get made today because it doesn't have established IP and we don't really cultivate brand name movie stars like Roberts & Gibson (not to mention that in a very sexless cinema, we've stripped out proper romance in everything from Snow White to Twisters unless absolutely necessary), but you watch this and understand why movie stars used to rule Hollywood: they provide an insurance policy for a script that doesn't really work (something that Iron Man or the Human Torch is never going to be able to do).

I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)

Film: I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)

Stars: Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Geller, Ryan Phillippe, Freddie Prinze, Jr., Johnny Galecki

Director: Jim Gillespie

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

All October long, The Many Rantings of John is running a marathon dedicated to the Horror classics of the 1960's-90's that I'm seeing for the first time this month.  If you want to take a look at past titles from previous horror marathons (both this and other seasons) check out the links at the bottom of this article.

As we wind down the month, we are weirdly going to the first of the 15 movies that I saw for this year's marathon (I watch them out-of-order...I am not a rich man so half of these screenings were the result of checking them out from the library cause that's free-support libraries!).  I Know What You Did Last Summer came in the wake of the Scream phenomenon and was a blockbuster on its own (they share the same screenwriter), making over $125 million worldwide, and spawning its own franchise (how this hasn't gotten a legacy sequel yet is beyond me).  The movie, though, isn't as well-regarded as the Scream movies, and I was curious why, because as a tween at the time observing this from afar (I was too young to get to watch R-rated horror movies), the two titles became synonymous in my head.  After watching them, though, I found that while Scream changed the game for horror, this movie merely continued a long-standing tradition of beautiful young people caught in a dangerous situation.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film focuses on a group of four friends right before graduating high school: Ray (Prinze), his girlfriend Julie (Hewitt), her best friend Helen (Geller), and her boyfriend Barry (Phillippe).  They are out joyriding, and in Julie & Ray's case, losing their virginity, and then during a drunken accident, they run over a man, whom they decide (after warding off Johnny Galecki's nerdy Max) that they need to dispose of his body in the ocean, so they can get away with the crime as they're certain they'll be charged with manslaughter.  Of course, like all good horror movies will tell you, it turns out he's still alive, and comes back a year later to start terrorizing the teens, whose lives have been upended in the wake of the tragedy (Helen gave up her acting dreams, Ray is a fisherman, Julie stopped using conditioner & yes that's literally commented on).  One-by-one, they start to die, until they finally face off against the man they thought they killed...once again throwing him in the ocean without any evidence that he is actually dead this time (he's not-there's a sequel).

As I mentioned above, Kevin Williamson wrote this in addition to Scream, but while this came out as a result of Scream, it was actually written before it.  Williamson had shopped the script all-over-town to no avail, but when his Scream script was a success, Columbia jumped at an easy cash grab & bought it. There was probably a reason that the script wasn't bought while Scream was-it's not very good.  Very loosely based on the mystery novel by Lois Duncan, it doesn't have the same sort of pop culture heartbeat that Scream does, and it honestly doesn't really present a strong mystery.  The backstory of Ben Willis (the man-with-a-hook whom they run over, and eventually start terrorizing) feels convoluted & not fun.  Scream was a blast not just because it was funny and upended the horror genre, but also because it's a good mystery.  In order to have a good mystery, one of the characters you already know need to be the killer, not some maskless man in the background with no real connection to the main characters.  Ray, as presented in the film, should be the killer, but instead he becomes a hero despite being absent for large swaths of the picture, serving instead as a red herring.

Still, there are fun aspects of this.  Teenage John was obsessed with Freddie Prinze, Jr. & Ryan Phillippe, both insanely sexy as the two men in this (to be fair, Hewitt, Geller, & Galecki all look good too-this is a very hot cast), and had I seen this as a teenager, the scene where Phillippe runs around in a towel might have broken my VCR.  Also, Sarah Michelle Geller steals every scene she's in as Helen Shivers.  Geller is operating on a different level here, fleshing out a character that is usually just a stereotype (the beautiful, bitchy prom queen trope that dies in the second act after not having grown at all).  You genuinely want her to live, and her death is actually a huge bummer because she's earned Final Girl status more than Julie by the end of the movie, even though smart, brainy (and brunette) Jennifer Love Hewitt's character fits more into the Laurie Strode cliche.

Past Horror Month Reviews

1920's: The Golem, The Phantom of the Opera

1930's: The Black Cat, The Bride of Frankenstein, Dracula, Dracula's Daughter, Frankenstein, Freaks, The Invisible Man, Mad Love, The Mummy, The Old Dark House, The Raven, Son of Frankenstein, Werewolf of London

1940's: Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Cat People, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, House of Dracula, The House of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man Returns, The Invisible Man's Revenge, The Invisible Woman, The Ghost of Frankenstein, Invisible Agent, The Mummy's Curse, The Mummy's Ghost, The Mummy's Hand, The Mummy's Tomb, Phantom of the Opera, She-Wolf of London, Son of Dracula, The Uninvited, The Wolf Man

1950's: Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man, Abbott & Costello Meet the Mummy, Attack of the 50-Foot Woman, The Blob, Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Creature Walks Among Us, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, It Came from Outer Space, Revenge of the Creature

1960's: The Devil Rides Out, The Innocents, The Masque of the Red Death, Night of the Living Dead,Village of the Damned

1970's: The Amityville Horror, Black Christmas, Carrie, Dawn of the Dead, Don't Look Now, Halloween, The Hills Have Eyes, The Omen, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, When a Stranger Calls, The Wicker Man

1980's: Child's Play, The Evil Dead, The Fly, Friday the 13th, Gremlins, Hellraiser, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Poltergeist, The Thing

1990's-Present: Arachnophobia, The Blair Witch Project, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Candyman, Scream

Lost Highway (1997)

Film: Lost Highway (1997)

Stars: Bill Pullman, Patricia Arquette, Balthazar Getty, Robert Blake, Robert Loggia, Richard Pryor

Director: David Lynch

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Throughout the month of June we will be doing a Film Noir Movie Marathon, featuring fifteen film noir classics that I'll be seeing for the first time.  Reviews of other film noir classics are at the bottom of this article.

We're going to end our series (thanks for playing along!) in the 1990's, a bit further than we normally go with film noir month, but there's a reason for that.  While the 1970's and early 1980's were the most fruitful period of neo-noir, the genre continues into today, and had something of a unique transformation in the 1990's, both in terms of throwbacks (Miller's Crossing, LA Confidential) and then a series of reinventions or surrealistic takes on the genre.  This was primarily driven by one director, who has spent most of his career doing takes on neo-noir: David Lynch.  Lynch's most famous works almost entirely are driven by the concept of noir; Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet, and Mulholland Drive are heavily borrowing from the genre.  In picking our film today, I hadn't seen the first of the three "Los Angeles" trilogy pictures that Lynch made from 1997-2006, and thought it would be appropriate to end with the director and Lost Highway.

(Spoilers Ahead) We'll get into it in a second, but this is a David Lynch film, so plot, even if you're watching with a magnifying glass, is hard to summarize but I'll give it a go.  The film opens with Fred Madison (Pullman) a musician who is suffering with sexual impotency in his marriage to wife Renee (Arquette).  The two are receiving strange videos of their house, and then eventually of them sleeping, with no indication as to who it is until one night when Pullman meets a Mystery Man (Blake) at a cocktail party, and he pulls a trick, calling essentially himself on a phone with no explanation as to how he did it.  We see in the next video that Fred gets sent that he is murdering his wife in it, and he is sentenced to death row, until one day...he disappears, and in his place is a young mechanic named Pete Dayton (Getty).  Pete works for a crook (and small-time porn producer) named Mr. Eddy (Loggia), whom we understand later is also named Dick Laurent, whom we hear mentioned in the opening scene by a disembodied voice when they tell Fred "Dick Laurent is dead."  Pete is having an affair with Alice, who looks just like Renee (and is also played by Arquette).  The film ends in a bit of a conundrum, with Pete transforming back into Fred, the Mystery Man shooting Mr. Eddy dead, and then whispering something to Fred that we don't hear.  The movie ends with Fred fulfilling his own destiny by turning out to be the man who says "Dick Laurent is dead" before going on a police chase, likely to his doom.

In 1997, the film was dismissed by critics who claimed it made no sense, but it developed a cult following (likely by gaining easy comparisons to Lynch's better-received Mulholland Drive a few years later), and is generally considered to be a good movie now (it just got a 4K restoration from Criterion).  Watching it having already seen Mulholland Drive, I can see the corollaries, but honestly-it's Lynch's clear obsession with older film noir, specifically two classics of the genre (Detour and Kiss Me Deadly, both of which we've done in past seasons and have reviews at the bottom of this article) that kind of give you a guide to the film.  So for the rest of this article, we're going to also issue a double spoiler alert for both of these movies.

Detour, in particular, is easy to spot here.  Lost Highway is about a man who cannot sexually fulfill his wife, and is dealing with the violent anger he feels as a result of that.  This is true to a degree to Detour, which shows a man who cannot land the woman he wants & is on the run, likely from the law, and being seduced (like Lost Highway) by a woman who is far beneath the "station" of the woman he wants, but still he has sex with her (in Detour, metaphorically, and in Lost Highway, literally).  In both movies, though, it's clear that the main protagonist is lying to the audience.  In Detour, this was to get around the Hays Code, while in Lost Highway it's to heighten the metaphor.  Pullman's Fred can't please his wife, so he transforms into someone he thinks can-a hyper-virile, sexy younger man in the form of Balthazar Getty, who is so horny he has both a hot girlfriend and a hotter side piece.

The film's odes to Kiss Me Deadly are also quite evident.  That movie is focused in large part on interchangeable women, but ones whom the audience knows are more important to the story than the men using them as props realize.  In that film, Cloris Leachman starts the film as a doomed figure who knows more than she's letting on (just like Arquette's Renee) while Gaby Rodgers is the embodiment of Arquette's Alice, an at-first sweet, likely victim...who turns out to have a sociopathic side that also includes agendas that we as the audience never entirely understand.

All of this is to say, I liked Lost Highway, but I didn't love it in the same way I did those two films, even though writing about it it's clear Lynch was showing off and maybe this will play better if I ever revisit.  Pullman & Getty are both intriguing, but the camera pulls back too much, perhaps not wanting to give away the ending.  I wanted more hints of Pullman's madness within (I think it's clear in retrospect that he did kill Renee, or at least some form of him did, because he was angry he couldn't fulfill her sexually), while I wanted more sexuality from Getty's character.  We see multiple sex scenes where Arquette is objectified, which is perhaps the point (this is Fred's fantasy...he doesn't care that the audience also wants to fuck Getty), but it maybe would've helped the cause more if they'd objectified their leading man too.

The best part of the movie, and I can't deny it, is Robert Blake.  Blake was in his late sixties when this came out, and had already had a really long career.  Blake was the very rare child star of the Golden Age of Hollywood (he appeared in the Little Rascals comedies and the Red Ryder westerns), before finding success as an adult in In Cold Blood and TV's Baretta.  He is superb as the Mystery Man, totally nailing the very tricky tone of the character, especially in the opening scene where he feeds off of Pullman's intrigue & terror as he confesses to being the man who is taping him...and may in fact be a manifestation of Fred's own evil.  

The film becomes more complicated (or at least more scandalous) when you know what happened next in Blake's career though.  Blake would be arrested and charged, just like Fred Madison, with the murder of his wife in real life several years after Lost Highway was released.  Like Fred, Blake maintained his innocence in real life, and (unlike Fred) was acquitted, though debate still rages as to whether or not he was guilty.  With that weird crossover into real life, we'll end another season of Film Noir Month, with us hopefully returning next year for another round of grizzled detectives, shady criminal enterprises, and beautiful women...who may be deadlier than they appear.

1940's: Act of Violence, The Big Sleep, The Blue Dahlia, Blues in the Night, Brighton Rock, Criss Cross, Crossfire, Daisy Kenyon, Dead Reckoning, Detour, Fallen Angel, The Fallen Idol, Force of Evil, Gilda, High Sierra, I Walk Alone, I Wake Up Screaming, The Killers, The Lady from Shanghai, Leave Her to Heaven, Ministry of Fear, Moonrise, Murder My Sweet, Nightmare Alley, Out of the Past, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Raw Deal, The Reckless Moment, Ride the Pink Horse, Scarlet Street, Sorry, Wrong Number, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, They Won't Believe Me, Too Late for Tears, The Woman in the Window, The Woman on the Beach

1950's: Ace in the Hole, Affair in Trinidad, The Asphalt Jungle, Beat the Devil, The Big Combo, The Big Heat, The Blue Gardenia, The Breaking Point, The Burglar, Cast a Dark Shadow, The Crimson Kimono, Elevator to the Gallows, Gun Crazy, The Hitch-Hiker, House of Bamboo, In a Lonely Place, The Killing, Kiss Me Deadly, Murder by Contract, Night and the City, Odds Against Tomorrow, On Dangerous Ground, Pickup on South Street, The Prowler, Slightly Scarlet, Sudden Fear, Sweet Smell of Success, They Live By Night, While the City Sleeps

Neo-Noir: Blade Runner, Body Heat, Farewell My Lovely, Fargo, From Afar, The Late Show, The Long Goodbye, Night Moves, Nightcrawler, Le Samourai

Taste of Cherry (1997)

Film: Taste of Cherry (1997)

Stars: Homayoun Ershadi, Abdolrahman Bagheri, Afshin Khorshid Bakhtiari, Safar Ali Moradi, Mir Hossein Noori

Director: Abbas Kiarostami

Oscar History: No nominations, but it won the Palme d'Or

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Today we take a look at one of the mid-90's Palme d'Or winners, and one from one of the more-celebrated directors of our time (at least if you ask your local cinephile rather than your local Oscar voter).  Abbas Kiarostami has made breathtaking movies (I love Certified Copy), but his movies come with their own detractors.  We'll get into this below, but Taste of Cherry, which is considered by many to be a landmark of minimalist movies, came armed with a lot of detractors, and was one of the more critically-mixed Palme winners of the decade (it actually shared the title with The Eel, which I've never seen and will surely be part of a future Palme week on the blog).  I found this strange having seen Certified Copy, a movie brimming with complicated ideas, but one that I think few people would consider dull, and so I went into Taste of Cherry with a high level of intrigue.  Let's find out where I land...

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is, as I mentioned above, quite minimalist.  It essentially is the story of Mr. Badii (Ershadi), a middle-aged man who is driving through Tehran looking for a man to do a specific job for him.  As he starts picking up different men, all in desperate need of the high amount of money he's promised to pay them, he confesses that he is going to kill himself, and he needs someone to bury him after he dies.  Continually the men who go in his car, from a young soldier to a theology student to a taxidermist try to talk him out of it, first by refusing to help and then with the taxidermist, telling him a long story about the taste of mulberries (I'm guessing the translation here is why the film is titled Taste of Cherry rather than Taste of Mulberry, but I could be wrong) eventually bringing him back from trying to kill himself many years ago.  The film ends with the taxidermist promising to kill Mr. Badii, but only if Mr. Badii is dead in the grave he's dug for himself, and the film ends with Mr. Badii lying (still alive) in the gravestone as a thunderstorm begins.

Well, that's not exactly where it ends.  My read on the initial ending was that Mr. Badii had listened to the taxidermist's story, and whatever had driven him to suicide was gone now, and so the taxidermist (someone who seemed to genuinely care about him) will find this man alive in the morning (you could also take the con here & assume he's taken his sleeping pills and has finally found the peace he's spent the movie looking for-it's a very open ending).  But the ending of the film is weirdly a long dark screen followed by a shot of Kiarostami filming the final scene, implying a strange break with the fourth wall of the movie.

The first ending is relatively conventional, but it works; having the main character who has spent the whole film trying to end his life have a question of whether he still has something to live for is a good ending-it works.  But the breaking of the fourth wall, for me, takes me out of the film entirely, and makes me wonder what the point was.  I didn't want to make sure I misread this sequence, so I read some theories on this before I wrote this review, and I don't buy it; the comments about a movie being a mini-death are provocative, but I feel like he put a giant asterisk on everything we've seen before us with this random "twist," and I left not sold.  I didn't entirely buy some of the issues that Roger Ebert (the most famous film critic in the world when this film came out, and its most vocal detractor) had with the film-I didn't so much find it boring as meandering, though I agree with Ebert's comments that the film would have been deepened had we learned something more about Mr. Badii and why he's trying to kill himself (and I also agree with Ebert that there is a clear queer element to this movie in the way that Mr. Badii picks up these men, seemingly implying something sexual in the delivery of his pickup).  But the ending kind of ruined what was otherwise a contemplative film that I enjoyed, but didn't love.  As a result, I'm going with 2/5 stars not because there wasn't potential, but because I can't shake an ending I felt jolted most of the rest of the movie.

OVP: Anastasia (1997)

Film: Anastasia (1997)
Stars: Meg Ryan, John Cusack, Kelsey Grammer, Christopher Lloyd, Hank Azaria, Bernadette Peters, Kirsten Dunst, Angela Lansbury
Director: Don Bluth & Gary Goldman
Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Original Song-"Journey to the Past," Score)
(Not So) Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

All right, I think (I pray) that my stomach virus is officially gone (as it appears to be, knock on wood), but I will not be attempting a third week of Foreign Language Film as at this point it feels like it's tempting fate (to keep up with the 2005 OVP, though, we'll still do that write-up, as well as the writing categories from that year sometime between now-and-Sunday).  Instead, we're moving on to a different slate of films, at least one of which will be in a foreign language, but all of which will be animated.  This week every one of our five reviews will be of animated features, all but today's being films that I saw for the first time over quarantine.  Today, though, we're revisiting a film from the mid-1990's, a time when Disney was hitting its renaissance, but not without competition.  In 1997, Disney's success with princesses had spilled over to Fox, with a major hit that seemed to rival Disney's success that decade, a movie about a real-life princess named Anastasia.

(Spoilers Ahead) We start in Imperialist Russia, where the Dowager Empress (Lansbury) gives a music box to the young Grand Duchess Anastasia (Ryan as an adult, Dunst as a child), and bids her farewell before she goes to Paris.  The two are saved during the Russian Revolution by a young boy named Dimitri (Cusack as an adult) who takes them through a secret drawer.  We learn that the Revolution is caused by Rasputin (Lloyd), who has sold his soul to curse the Romanovs.  Ten years later, there are rumors that the young princess survived the night, and the Dowager Empress has put up a reward for her discovery, but no one knows who she is.  Dimitri and his associate Vlad (Grammer) find a young woman who resembles her, Anya, who it turns out is the real Anastasia despite them only hoping to impersonate her.  The film's final third is a standoff between Rasputin and the now-in-love Anastasia & Dimitri.

The film is loosely based on the real-life story of Anna Anderson, whom we discussed here (which, again, was a loose interpretation).  As I mentioned at the time, even as late as the 1990's the mystery of whether or not Anderson was Anastasia was coming to a close, but hadn't been shut at that point (and we'd wait a decade before there was confirmation of all five children's bodies having been discovered, proving that one of the great mysteries of the 20th Century, whether one of the Romanovs survived, had an unsatisfying & tragic answer of "no").  Still, this doesn't have the same "is she or isn't she?" question that the more historically-minded 1956 film did, and so it isn't ruined as much by knowing that Anderson was not Anastasia, and that the real Anastasia died at the age of 17 in 1918, since we know in the confines of the film that she is Anastasia.

The film, though, is not very good.  It's a bit sloppy, the comic bits are wrong-headed, but it has a great score, to the point where you'd be forgiven if this was a "guilty pleasure" (which it is for me, and which is why it's getting a 3-star even if it deserves a 2).  The opening ode "A Rumor in St. Petersburg" is hilarious and recalls something like "Belle" and "Once Upon a December" is a romantic, moody ballad that runs well through the film.  Honestly, it's a pity that one of the least of the film's songs "Journey to the Past" was the one that ultimately got a nomination because we could have done so much better.

Before we go I want to remind everyone that while many animation snobs spent decades pointing out that Anastasia was not a Disney Princess, with the Fox merger Disney now owns this property.  I've become mildly obsessed over if/when some of the major properties that Disney purchased (not just Anastasia, but also Rio, Ferdinand, and the mammoth (pun-intended) animated franchise Ice Age) will get rides or nods from the studio at their parks, but so far we haven't seen any hints that Anastasia will be added to the successful Disney Princess line or will be a character at the parks, but I have to imagine this is in the works.  If you want, sound off in the comments on which Fox property is the first to get a nod at Disney's theme parks.

Seven Years in Tibet (1997)

Film: Seven Years in Tibet (1997)
Stars: Brad Pitt, David Thewlis, BD Wong, Mako
Director: Jean-Jacques Annaud
Oscar History: No nominations, despite it having a pretty solid pedigree (beautiful sets, gorgeous cinematography, and a score by John Williams); one of only three films where Williams won a Golden Globe nomination for his music but not an Oscar nod (the others being Earthquake and The Post)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

If you'd have asked me as a very young teenager what films seemed to be the height of luxury, I probably would have brought up Titanic, Meet Joe Black, and Seven Years in Tibet, despite having never seen the latter film.  For some reason (hormones) I had become entranced with Seven Years in Tibet, the exoticism of climbing into a far-away land, but mostly was just focused (because of hormones, pay attention) on a 34-year-old Brad Pitt with dyed-blond bangs and impossibly blue eyes.  Like, if you were to describe my type as a 13-year-old it would either be blond Brad Pitt or blond Leo DiCaprio (it is not a mistake that the first boyfriend I ever had was, in fact, a blond with blue eyes).  Because of the film's rating I wasn't allowed to see the picture initially, and for some reason, despite a morbid curiosity over what was in the film, I never got around to seeing it until it randomly popped to the top of my Netflix queue this past week, and so the 13-year-old in me finally got to see this movie that he randomly romanticized so frequently while staring at photos of Pitt's delicately-balanced bangs and imagining growing up to be his boyfriend (I'm aware this is an embarrassing story, but I figured you needed an honest entry point as to why I would be watching this movie in 2019).

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is inspired loosely on the memoirs of Heinrich Harrer (Pitt), a mountain climber at the precipice of World War II who goes on an expedition with Peter Aufschnaiter (Thewlis) in British India climbing Nanga Parbat, only to find himself in a POW camp when Britain goes to war with Germany.  Harrer's wife says she wants a divorce, and she has a son who wants nothing to do with him, and so when he escapes the camp he doesn't head back to Austria, but instead into Tibet.  There he becomes acquainted with key Tibetan officials, and begins a tutorship/friendship with the young Dalai Lama (truly random bit of trivia here-the woman who plays the Dalai Lama's mother in the film is actually Jetsun Pema, who is the current Dalai Lama's real-life sister, so she's playing her actual mother in the film).  This takes place at a formative time for the Dalai Lama, as China starts its occupation of Tibet, and so we have the juxtaposition of a young man, viewed as a deity by all around him, learning about the western world which we know as a modern audience will be crucial to his future, as the 14th Dalai Lama would become an international figure and a Nobel laureate.

The film is one that hasn't aged particularly well.  The idea of a white savior coming into a world he doesn't understand, and finding that he can teach the most important figure in that world about his own culture feels off, and a bit inappropriate twenty years later; it's difficult to imagine a film like Seven Years in Tibet being made in the same fashion today.  It's eased a little by the actual Dalai Lama admitting the influence the real-life Harrer had on his life, and the friendship that continued until Harrer's death in 2006 between the two men, but it's hard to not feel a little bit icky knowing that this was part of a long history of such movies where white people tried to insert themselves as the savior to a community of color.

That said, the film is interesting, and Pitt is good in it.  If you can get past the come-and-go German accent (Brad Pitt is a brilliant actor, but he has never been particularly strong at accents) and the impossible hair (unless Tibet happens to be just above Beverly Hills, I doubt it would have been possible to have flawlessly-dyed bangs in remote 1940's Asia), you get a strong performance from him, one that manages to make an unlikable man believably transition into someone of decency, who deserves the happy ending he gets with his son.  And yes, 13-year-old John, you'd be hard-pressed to find a movie where Pitt looked more "movie star gorgeous" than this picture; I would have passed out at the time if I'd watched the scene where he gets tailored for a suit.  The score is incredible (one of Williams's better outings in the 1990's), and the cinematography is lush & divine.  It looks like Netflix will soon have the film's sister picture Kundun available on DVD, so I'll be able to compare, but between the costumes, score, cinematography, and art direction, it's kind of inexcusable that this movie didn't get at least one Oscar nomination back in 1997, even if everyone was mostly enamored with a giant luxury liner sinking in the North Atlantic at the time.

OVP: Afterglow (1997)

Film: Afterglow (1997)
Stars: Nick Nolte, Julie Christie, Lara Flynn Boyle, Jonny Lee Miller
Director: Alan Rudolph
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Actress-Julie Christie)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

Each cinematic era has its quirks, and you have to remember them, as oftentimes what feels like a weird aesthetic choice in the present was very common sense at the time.  Take, for example, Afterglow, where now-pop culture punching bag Nick Nolte is playing an aging lothario, who somehow has women throwing themselves at him despite, from my vantage point, having virtually no  sex appeal whatsoever.  This might sound cruel, and quite frankly it probably is, but considering it's a crux of this particular picture, you have to let it go (anyone want to take bets on which current leading man will come across as bizarre as a romantic love interest in the future?).  This is, however, one of many suspensions of belief in the very-90's Afterglow which scored a precursor-less nomination for Best Actress with Julie Christie over Jessica Lange & Pam Grier.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film, by Alan Rudolph, reads a lot like a chamber play.  We have four central characters in the form of two couples.  There's the older of these two pairs, Phyllis (an aging B-movie actress played by Christie) and Lucky Mann (yes, that's really the name they give him with not enough of a wink, played by Nolte), who is an aging handyman who regularly sleeps with the women for whom he works.  The younger couple is Marianne (Boyle), a woman in a sexless marriage who wants a baby with her husband Jeffrey (Miller), a suicidal corporate executive who is struggling with some sort of crisis-of-faith, and also really has a thing for older women.  The movie unfolds with the pairs starting to intermingle, with Lucky & Marianne starting an affair, while Jeffrey has an emotional fling with Phyllis.

The film would feel pretty standard-fare on the stage, and probably would work better there as it could handle the "too much plot" angle a bit better.  Here, though, they gloss over many of the essential details and perhaps should have worked better on where to focus the story.  For starters, with the exception of Christie, none of these roles really work in hindsight.  Even suspending belief for a moment, it's hard to picture Nolte's handyman as being something of a sex symbol.  He's haggard, not-particularly-attractive, and has little actual charm other than being able to carry out a series of double entendres with a woman shoving her bosom in his face.  That's literally it, and it's a problem in particular because none of this movie really works if you don't buy that multiple different women are madly in love with Nolte's Lucky Mann, and I never did.

But this is only part of the problem.  Even if you're like "to each his own," the younger couple is all kinds of messed up.  Boyle brings nothing to this role other than looking thin in a negligee, and her  marriage to Jeffrey is absurd-how the hell was he nice enough to her to begin with to have us buy that she actually would marry him; they're both attractive, but these two play so polar opposite and so bitter it's impossible to imagine them ever finding each other desirable.  There's not even a sign from either actor that this is a George-and-Martha, where time has made them bitter, but instead every indication they've always been like this.  Then there's Miller, who only brings a blank handsomeness to his Jeffrey, and clearly cannot connect to his scripted mother obsession.  Bennett doesn't help him at all by casting Christie, who even in her early 60's looks decades younger and is the sort of beautiful that only an aging movie star can be.  As an audience member, you think less when he's enamored with her that "he has a thing for older women" and more "yeah, I'd try for that too."  Miller's the weakest link here, which is a bad sign (as Nolte & Boyle are giving bad performances), mostly because you leave knowing virtually nothing about him except what's on the page, and there's a lot on the page left for him to handle (homophobia, loss of libido, issues with masculinity), but he can't connect with any of it.  It's am embarrassingly bad piece of work, and perhaps a sign of why his star never took off like his movie star wife Angelina Jolie's.

The sole redeeming factor is Christie, who is still able to manage endless movie memories with her face still the ethereal beauty of our Lara (fun fact-Boyle is named after Christie's character in Doctor Zhivago).  Here she's playing a B-movie actress and has some fun with the script, which is a juicy part.  She lands some of the absurd comedy of the role, and the scenes where she's struggling with her betrayal of Lucky years previously, and the deadness that resulted from her having to give up her daughter, are solid work.  But there's still a lot missing in this performance, which is kind of why I was shocked after watching the film that it landed the Oscar nomination over showier parts like Lange, Grier, or Julia Roberts big comeback in My Best Friend's Wedding.  You don't buy the film's climax, where she's upset with Lucky for breaking their agreement, perhaps because you never buy them as a couple who cares about one another, or understand why they never broke up.  Christie feels too detached in her scenes where she isn't pining for a time gone by or trying to charm a charmless Miller.  Some might market this as a diamond in the rough, but it's really more the vanilla sitting between the arsenic and cyanide-it's the only item on the menu that's not going to kill you.

Waiting for Guffman (1997)

Film: Waiting for Guffman (1997)
Stars: Christopher Guest, Eugene Levy, Fred Willard, Catherine O'Hara, Parker Posey, Bob Balaban
Director: Christopher Guest
Oscar History: Nothing to speak of, though the film received three Spirit Award nominations.
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

After spending so much time in 2011, for some reason my Netflix queue decided I should take a quick detour into 1997, and into the world of Christopher Guest.  My brother is a huge fan of his films, and for some reason or another his films always intrigue me, but not so much that I seek them out (this is only the second of his movies that I've seen).  The only film of his I had seen, For Your Consideration, was not a favorite of mine despite it dealing with Oscar campaigns (which of course, I adore), and though I was told that it was not his best work, I have to admit that Guffman, one of his more acclaimed pieces, was not to my liking at all.

The film is about a community theatre group who are being lead by the effeminate Corky St. Clair (played by Guest), a New York theater man who clearly struck out in the Big Apple and is now lording his brief tour in the city over a small town group of show-biz wannabes.  Guest, who consistently uses the same players in most of his films, surrounds himself with real-life acting talents playing some version of a rube-two mildly obnoxious travel agents (Willard & O'Hara), a dentist with Michael Scott sort of delusions (Levy), a Dairy Queen worker wanting more out of life (Posey), and a hunky but dopey mechanic (Matt Keeslar) whom Corky is clearly attracted to, despite his many conversations to the camera about his wife Bonnie (a running joke that goes nowhere).  The film is in the style of a mockumentary (like most of Guest's films), and we see how the actors slowly get more out-of-control when they realize that a Broadway producer (the titular, but never seen, Guffman) is about to come to their town to review the play.

You obviously know where this is going (Guffman will never come and see the play, and the cast members will never get the stardom they've dreamt about), but predictability is not what hinders a film-a truly great director or writer will try and rise above it, and though there's something to be said for the Altman-esque style of Guest's filmmaking, unlike Altman, the message seems to be constantly sarcastic-look at how absurd these people are, look how silly it is to dream.  In my opinion, it's a deeply mean-spirited sort of film and I don't believe that is what Guest was going for; if his point is to show how even the biggest of dreamers look ridiculous from the audience's vantage point, that's one thing, but if it's to simply poke fun at how stupid these people appear, that's quite another.  At least with For Your Consideration, you got to see some of the ramifications of what the film's catalyst has done to the characters (that devastating moment when O'Hara realizes that she will not receive an Oscar nomination is a performing triumph even if the rest of the film flounders); in this film, it's just another cheap laugh at the characters.  Again, I'm not saying that mocking your characters is a bad thing, but it feels so out-of-place in this initially pleasant movie.

The film is very, very short, so I don't have much more to say.  Guest just isn't my cup-of-tea, I guess (though I do have Best in Show and A Mighty Wind coming up in my Netflix queue due to their presences on some projects, so I might still be won over), but I'd love a Guest fan to explain to me the appeal-it's not like I wouldn't like to love him (and I acknowledge that there's some strong intelligence going on here)-is this his best outing, or do I have a better film waiting for me?  Do share in the comments!