I rest my case about its overrating, since most of us saw that last night.
It made my ten best list, but barely, when I decided it was better than
_Bulworth_. all the other best pcture nominees did, too, but that doesn't
mean a whole lot when I only got to see (I think) seventeen 1998 films,
the only really bad one being Emmerich's _Godzilla_, which as a fan of
Ishiro Honda, Yoshimitsu Banno, and Takao Okawara, I had been dreading it
so much that it was actually better than I expected it to be, but not
much.
My belated ten-best list of 1998, as meaningless as it might be, and
however changeable it will be in the future, goes to (in alphabetical
order, because quibbling among very different films is tough):
Buffalo 66
Dark City
Elizabeth
Saving Private Ryan
Shakespeare in Love
A Simple Plan
Smoke Signals
The Thin Red Line
The Truman Show
La Vita E Bella
Ther others I saw were _Bulworth_ (pretty good), _Godzilla_ (entertaining
ONCE-and that's giving it too much credit), _Small Soldiers_
(Dante--witty), _T-Rex: Back to the Cretaceous_ (starring a fellow former
NCHS student whom I've seen on stage--pretty decent first film role, not
counting her cameo in _Can't Hardly Wait_), _One True Thing_ (good, but
nothing special), _Waking Ned Devine (sweet and funny), and _What Dreams
May Come_ (visually splendid, but I didn't think it was all that great).
I wish I had gotten to see more indie films.
Of this years films, I've seen _Ravenous_ and _Trekkies_. I hope one of
Antonia Bird's goals in that film was to make the audience vegetarians,
because the though of eating red meat, especially ribs, has made me
nauseous, like the Ludovico Method, ever since I saw the film Saturday.
Everything about it was exceptionally well done except the story, which
was reasonably good. It's a quirky little film that's obviously not going
to do well. Go buy the soundtrack (if you can find it): it's worth it.
A les brief, a little more scholarly, review should show up on the IMDb
page for it soon.
Scott
===============================================================================
Scott Andrew Hutchins
http://php.iupui.edu/~sahutchi
Oz, Monsters, Kamillions, and More!
"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously."--Noam Chomsky
----
Online resources for film/TV studies may be found at ScreenSite
http://www.tcf.ua.edu/ScreenSite
|