With
all the talk about 2007 as a singularly great year for movies, we at The
A.V. Club have been discussing among ourselves what years we'd nominate as the
best-of-the-best. For the next several weeks, The A.V. Club's regular film reviewers will offer our individual choices.)
In the public imagination, 1994 will forever be the year of Pulp Fiction vs. Forrest Gump, two movies that transcended the boundaries of film to become massive pop-culture phenomena. The two Best Picture nominees (Gump won the big award, while Tarantino and Roger Avary walked away with the Best Original Screenplay consolation prize) epitomized the cultural divide between the sneering nihilism of Generation X slackazoids and smug nostalgia of baby boomers nestled forever in a snug cocoon of self-regard.
But the two films have a surprising amount in common. Forrest
Gump's thick sentimental streak masks a raging undercurrent of pop-culture-damaged irreverence, while Pulp Fiction's blood-splattered cynicism can't completely conceal a moralistic streak of its own, albeit one that comes coated
in a thick layer of protective irony. Let Robert Bresson have his Catholicism
and transcendence: Tarantino's spiritual searchers are more likely to find deep
meaning in pop ephemera like Kung Fu.
Like Nirvana's Nevermind, Pulp Fiction brought the
drug-damaged darkness of the counterculture kicking and screaming into the
mainstream. Tarantino's secondhand aesthetic infected not just film, but all of
pop culture, with a vengeance.
1994 was a year the underground and the mainstream got
hopelessly confused. It was a strange moment in which super-producer Joel
Silver, of all people, got the Coen brothers a blockbuster budget to make a
giddy parody/homage to screwball comedies called The Hudsucker
Proxy.
The result may not have been smart business, but it was firecracker
entertainment, and perhaps the Coens' most underrated film. Tim Burton used the
commercial clout he'd accrued by making his corporate overlords at Warner
Brothers a mint from his Batman movies to smuggle a black-and-white
tribute to a cross-dressing poverty-row filmmaker past studio gatekeepers.
Tarantino was far from the only cult filmmaker having a
breakthrough year. On the other side of the world, a brilliant young iconoclast
named Wong Kar-Wai created a hypnotic dreamscape in Chungking
Express
that impressed Tarantino so much that he pimped it through his Rolling Thunder
distribution company. In Canada, Atom Egoyan broke out of the arthouse ghetto
with Exotica, with the help of Mia Kirschner in a skimpy schoolgirl outfit,
and Terry Zwigoff replicated his subject's neat trick of transforming agonizing
personal torment into art in Crumb.
Kevin Smith's uber-grungy Clerks captured the low-key, agreeable vibe
of smartass go-nowhere buddies hanging out and talking shit. It was cinematic
democracy in action, a triumph of proletariat ingenuity over technical wizards
with film-school degrees and elaborate storyboards. Elsewhere, mavericks like
David O. Russell and Rose Troche took inspiration from the punk ethos prizing
energy, enthusiasm, and authenticity over slickness and production values by
making raw, personal, pleasingly unpolished films about the seething angst of
the neurotic and overeducated (Russell's Spanking The Monkey,) and
the romantic entanglements of Chicago lesbians (Troche's Go
Fish).
It was a period where the mainstream cluelessly tried to
connect with a youth culture it didn't begin to understand. Gen-X-baiting films
lke Reality Bites and S.F.W. weren't quite the cinematic
equivalents of the infamous "It's like punk rock, only a car" commercial, but
they were damned close. Yet time has a way of forgetting the misfires and
honoring and preserving films that connect to something authentic in
the culture at large. Here's some of the cream that rose to the top and stayed
there:
Nathan Rabin's top five of 1994
1. Wong Kar-Wai's rapturous mood piece Chungking
Express pulses with heartbreak and loss. It's a pulp romance of
hypnotic, shimmering surfaces and deep underlying sadness about a pair of
lovelorn cops that throbs with the restrained eroticism of big-city life, a
metropolitan milieu tingling with the promise of a million potential lovers and
the pathos of missed opportunities.
With the help of drunken master cinematographer Christopher
Doyle and an unforgettable soundtrack that manages to make even the Cranberries
seem almost cool, Wong Kar-Wai attains a sustained state of giddy sensual
rapture. After falling in love with Chungking, you'll never look at a
soon-to-expire tin of pineapple the same way again.
2. What more needs to be said of Pulp Fiction, a film that retains its iconic aura
even after 13 years of parodies and knock-offs? It's the film that launched a
thousand terrible direct-to-DVD thrillers, yet it still feels as fresh and
revolutionary today as Jean Luc-Godard's Breathless. As a work of creative synthesis,
Tarantino's rollicking black comedy about hitmen, robbers, washed-up boxers, and
anal rapists is unparalleled. As storytelling, it's masterful. As pop
iconography, it's both rooted in its era and ultimately timeless.
3. Tim Burton's longtime empathy for underdogs, weirdoes, losers, and
outcasts found perhaps its purest expression in Ed Wood, a heartfelt
tribute to a man widely considered the worst filmmaker of all time. It's a
lushly realized variation on the sturdy "Let's put on a show" subgenre that
finds Johnny Depp's infectiously optimistic dreamer serving as the loving
father figure to an oddball makeshift family of over-the-hill wrestlers, quack
psychics, and tragic transsexuals. Martin Landau rightfully won an Oscar for his
achingly sad portrayal of Bela Lugosi shuffling toward the grave with as much
battered dignity as his cut-rate surroundings will allow.
4. More than a decade before Good Night And Good Luck , director Robert Redford and
screenwriter Paul Attanasio delivered perhaps the definitive portrait of television's
sad decline from an unprecedented tool to inform and educate the masses to a
vast wasteland of sleaze and sensationalism, in Quiz
Show. Ralph Fiennes gives a tormented, deeply internal performance as a WASP
golden-boy professor who is tapped by unscrupulous producers to defeat grating,
abrasive, unmistakably Jewish reigning champ John Turturro in a rigged game
show to pump up ratings. Redford's richly ambiguous morality tale about a
show-business scandal had lasting ramifications that went far beyond the world
of television. It's also a sad reminder of a bygone era where the concept of a
prominent public intellectual like Fiennes' Charles Van Doren was something
more than just an egghead's fevered dream.
5. Atom Egoyan's breakthrough film, Exotica, accomplished
the formidable feat of winning at both Cannes and the Adult Video News Awards,
where its left-field victory for "Best Alternative Adult Film" placed it in the
distinguished company of Jenna Jameson (Best New Starlet) and Poolparty
At Seymore's 1 and 2 (Best Gonzo Video). Yet in spite of accolades from the trenchcoat set,
Egoyan's mesmerizing, intricate drama is largely a cerebral affair about the
intertwined lives of desperate characters who work at, run, and frequent a
nightclub where mysterious Mia Kershner dances for repressed auditor Bruce
Greenwood as part of a somber ritual whose meaning becomes apparent only at the
film's close. A master class in its filmmaker's pet themes, from voyeurism and
obsession to the lingering sting of loss and grief, Exotica is detached and cold until all its
interlocking pieces fall into place, at which point it becomes deeply moving
and shatteringly emotional.
Sleepers:
Before he became King of the Shire, Peter Jackson made an
impressive transition from proudly juvenile shock merchant to mature filmmaker
with Heavenly Creatures, an intense character study based on
the true story of a pair of teenage girls whose shared fantasy world turns
deadly.
Meanwhile, Terry Zwigoff's queasily intimate exploration of
the neuroses, psychoses, and madness of not just R. Crumb in Crumb, but also his brilliant, hopelessly
fucked-up siblings set a precedent for candor and honesty that will be hard to
top. The film may have cost Zwigoff his friendship with Crumb, but it also
launched his career.
Director Gus Van Sant and screenwriter Buck Henry adapted
Joyce Maynard's novel into a scathingly satirical deconstruction of the
American will to succeed at any cost in To Die For. Nicole Kidman is spellbinding as
an empty striver who manipulates lovestruck teenager Joaquin Pheonix into
killing her well-meaning husband (Matt Dillon) as a means of kick-starting her
television career.
More Notable Films From 1994:
Spanking The Monkey:
David O. Russell
never makes the same film twice. Which is fortunate, since it's doubtful
audiences could handle another film as brutal, honest, and unrelentingly intense
as his Oedipally charged independent debut about an unhappy young man (Jeremy
Davies) who gets way too close to his fetching mother one hellacious summer at
home.
Fear Of A Black Hat:
In his puckish directorial
debut, Rusty Cundieff and his merry band of pranksters manage to smartly
satirize just about every trend in rap history in 88 minutes, and still tell a
coherent story. That's no mean feat.
The Shawkshank Redemption:
Frank Darabont's handsomely
mounted adaptation of a Stephen King short story traveled a strange path from
warmly (if not ecstatically) received crowd-pleaser to Oscar contender to
middlebrow cult film to ridiculously overrated modern "classic." According to
Internet Movie Database users, it's nothing less than the second-greatest film
of all time. Not bad for a solid, well-made, if generally unremarkable homage to
hope, the resilience of the human spirit, and all that other sentimental
horseshit.
Natural Born Killers:
Agitated old
dinosaur Oliver Stone took Quentin Tarantino's channel-flipping nihilism to
headache-inducing extremes in this assaultive satire of tabloid sensationalism
that doubles as a sledgehammer example of what it's ostensibly satirizing.
The Last Seduction:
Building on the
pitch-black brilliance of his woefully overlooked debut Kill Me
Again, John
Dahl solidified his status as the king of neo-noir with this blackly comic
thriller about a sick twist (Linda Fiorentino) with a genius for manipulating
hapless suckers to her advantage. Fiorentino's ferocious lead performance here
seemed to herald a dazzling career that never quite materialized.
Still Unseen:
Oh man, I am so not making myself a target. Let's just say I
haven't seen Wagons East. Or The Stoned Age. And lots of other
films that would make you gasp in horror at the depth and scope of my
film-watching shortcomings.
Runners-Up:
As an a
'70s baby, I was mighty tempted to go with 1973, the year of Serpico, American Graffiti, The Last Detail, Mean
Streets, Sisters, The Long Goodbye, Badlands, The Last American Hero, Paper
Moon, The Exorcist, Electra Glide In Blue, Charley Varrick, Day For Night, Pat
Garrett & Billy The Kid, Scarecrow, and The Mother And The Whore, but "The Man"—Keith—apparently felt it
was too close to my colleague Noel Murray's 1974. Whatever, dude. 1996 was also
looking good, what with Fargo, Jerry Maguire, Lone Star, Secrets & Lies, That
Thing You Do!, Flirting With Disaster, Bottle
Rocket, Hard Eight, The English Patient, Kingpin, Mission: Impossible, Swingers, Trainspotting
, and Waiting
For Guffman.
Next week: Tasha Robinson on 1986.
Click
here to read Noel Murray's thoughts on 1974.
Click
here to read Keith Phipps' thoughts on 1967.