"Ten Movies That Shook The World" (1977 - 1999), the semi-sequel to my piece on "How "Star Wars" Changed Everything," is now at MSN Movies.
Excerpt:
"Beverly Hills Cop" (1984)
It's a comedy. It's an action movie. It's a fish-out-of-water story. It has Eddie Murphy. It's the '80s in a nutshell! Here we have the quintessential example of the "high concept" movie that has lit the light which is green at studios from Burbank to Culver City. I saw it with Eszter Balint, the then-18-year-old Hungarian-American actress who played cousin Eva in "Stranger Than Paradise." She told me afterward that she felt bad for the families of all the expendable characters who were killed in the gunfight and car chase scenes. With its (some would say rather callous) synthesis of comedy and violence, "BHC" (and Walter Hill's "48 HRS") brought a slicked-up exploitation-movie sensibility into the mainstream, paving the way in the 1990s for "Pulp Fiction" and its imitators.
"Top Gun" (1986)
A breakthrough in the portrayal of homoeroticism in Hollywood movies (we've all seen Quentin Tarantino's monologue about how it's the gayest movie ever, right?), as well as the apotheosis of the slick, MTV-style action picture produced by Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer (now just Bruckheimer, since Don Simpson OD'd on Tinseltown decadence). The deliberate, disorienting music-video cutting, the contemporary pop soundtrack, the shameless celebration of testosterone-injected buddy love -- it's all here, from Tony Scott ("The Last Boy Scout," "Beverly Hills Cop II," "Domino") to Michael Bay ("Armageddon," "Pearl Harbor") and beyond. One could argue that Adrian Lyne's 1983 celluloid video about the lady welder who was "a maniac, maniac" for dancing under buckets of water at gentlemen's clubs (aka "Flashdance") deserves this spot, but it lacks the militaristic gay element that became so prevalent in popular movies. "Brokeback Mountain" may have been sired out of "Red River," but "Top Gun" also blazed a trail for it.
Wow! What a great read that was. Your arguments are not only fun to read but entirely convincing.
I think it is perhaps an exaggeration to say that Toy Story made hand-drawn animation obsolete. It certainly marked the rise of computer animation, but it's inaccurate to portray this as an either-or equation.
You appear to be mostly looking at Disney, which is a bit myopic. After duds like Treasure Planet and Atlantis, Disney decided the problem was hand-drawn animation had been made, as you put it, obsolete. As their tepid CG outings like Chicken Little have shown, the animation format was never the problem. Bad storytelling is bad storytelling, whether it's hand-drawn or CGI. On the flip, Pixar's genius lies not their expertise in CG, but that they apply that expertise in the service of excellent storytelling.
But I submit the market for hand-drawn animation has not disappeared, nor has it dwindled to be some obscure niche. Since 1995, the most dominant trend in for overall sales in the American animation market has been the rise of Japanese anime, which is predominantly hand-drawn. Nickelodeon's hand-drawn movies have performed better than their CG outings, as I understand. And it looks like Disney is going back to the well with a new hand-drawn feature... which we can only hope will have some real creative energy behind it.
Anyway, interesting article overall.
The movies that shook my world Jim...
Bladerunner: The first film I saw that through every aspect of the film (atmosphere, dialogue, performances, cinematography, sound effects, etc.) brought me and enveloped me in a completely different world - one that was also intelligent and intriguing. I think this was the one that made me want to be an actor/filmmaker.
Die Hard: The first rated R film I saw. But it also allowed me to see a flawed individual in the role of hero, one that could bleed and be hurt. When a bullet was fired you were scared it might hit him. It also reinvented the action from the bloated Arnold and Sly films of the day and it's effect is still seen. The thinking man's action hero and the everyman's action hero rolled into one. John McClane kicks ass.
Rashomon: Kurosawa's tale showed me that a complex narrative and an ambiguous theme could be just as intriguing and emotionally involving as any other film. I remember after watching it by myself, I then drove immediately to a friend's and made him watch it, then to a second friend's and made him watch it. It also opened me up to foreign cinema.
Andrei Rublev and Solaris: These two films I viewed within a relatively short time span from one another, Solaris first. Talk about showing the human soul opened wide for an audience to see. Tarkovsky's films taught me more about film and character and the beauty of cinema more than any other filmmaker. Andrei Rublev is the first film I remember weeping at the end of.
Through a Glass Darkly and Cries and Whispers: They say Persona is the one to watch, but these two films by Ingmar Bergman destroyed me emotionally and continued to elevate the way in which I view story and the importance that cinema has as an artistic expression of beliefs, which was further deepened by the Passion of Anna in which I also saw how breaking the boundaries of cinema by use of the camera and the breaking of the fourth wall spoke volumes.
Evil Dead 2: I saw this on the same night and just before watching Bladerunner for the first time. Talk about mind boggling. I don't know what else to say about that, but it has also influenced by desire to create visual films, and is a trickle down from the third listed of the next three films.
Ghostbusters, Beastmaster and Big Trouble in Little China: As a kid these were probably the three films that I clung to and probably helped shape my personality, imagination and tastes. It wasn't until later that I realized just how much female nudity there was in Beastmaster...not saying that I'm a pervert or anything.
Your Pia Zadora reference is most intriguing. I knew of her only from Johnny Carson monologues (she was a staple for a couple of weeks or so) and I assumed he was saying P.Isadora.
To name another much ballyhooed non-splash--good in diving, less so in movies--what about Yahoo Serious?
Quick question:
Why do you consider Stranger than Paradise "the birth of modern American independent film", and not, say, Return of the Secaucus 7, which beat StP by four years? Sayles is certainly responsible for an entire generation of would-be writer-directors working on shoestring budgets, producing character-driven dramas without studio support. I'm not denying StP had its own type of impact on the indie scene, but S7 seems like a more legitimate landmark for the "birth" of modern American indie film. Is that fair, or am I missing something?
Chronological
1. Birth of a Nation
2. Battleship Potemkin
3. Gone with the Wind
4. Citizen Kane
5. Rashomon
6. Breathless
7. 2001: A Space Odyssey
8. Star Wars (not my fave, but definitely a shaker!)
9. Do the Right Thing
10. Brokeback Mountain (shook things up not even so much for gays about about bigotry in Hollywood; same re: Do the Right Thing)