1996 Cii Movie Awards (Take 2)

This list (Take 2) was compiled July 5, 2013.  Take 1 is available here.
                       For the criteria of the Cii Movie Awards, click here.

Top 10 Films of 1996
1. Lone Star (John Sayles)
2. A Moment of Innocence (Mohsen Makhmalbaf)
3. Mission: Impossible (Brian De Palma)
4. Secrets & Lies (Mike Leigh)
5. Drifting Clouds (Aki Kaurismäki)
6. The People vs. Larry Flynt (Milos Forman)
7. Fargo (Joel Coen)
8. Get on the Bus (Spike Lee)
9. Six O'Clock News (Ross McElwee)
10. American Buffalo (Michael Corrente)
Honorable Mentions: Irma Vep (Olivier Assayas), Kansas City (Robert Altman), Mother (Albert Brooks), Jerry Maguire (Cameron Crowe), Scream (Wes Craven), Stealing Beauty (Bernardo Bertolucci), Waiting for Guffman (Christopher Guest), The Rock (Michael Bay), Flirting with Disaster (David O. Russell), La Promesse (Luc & Jean-Pierre Dardenne)

Judging Oscar: 1975

For previous Oscar assessments, check out 1973, 1980 and 1996.

BEST PICTURE

WINNER: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Milos Forman, 1975)
One of the quintessential anti-establishment pictures, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is able to capture the frustration, rage and bewilderment of being trapped in a system that seems to be a benefit only to realize that walls and bars are not so bad: it is the people who smile calmly at you while taking everything from you that should terrify us most.  It is wonderfully written and performed while Haskell Wexler’s cinematography tries its hardest to avoid shadows inside the hospital, lighting everything as evenly as possible until we get to those night scenes.  Avoiding the pat functionality of every character “representing something,” Forman is able to carefully chart the growing relationships within the group of patients and how their awareness of the world and each other is slowly affecting them.  Forman also maintains a consistent point-of-view, never leaving the patients to present the world outside the hospital or in the doctor’s conferences.  This not only endears us to the patients (and McMurphy in particular), but also adds to our growing frustration as we see the institution seemingly create some of the diseases it offers to cure.

Judging Oscar: 1996

I have watched or re-watched all the nominees for Best Picture and Best Director, giving my assessments below.  Check out previous Judging Oscar assessments from 1973 and 1980.

BEST PICTURE

WINNER: The English Patient (Anthony Minghella, 1996)

A pretty typical historical epic of love and loss made more interesting by some decent performances and wonderful production elements yet is hindered by some lapses in story and character.  Minghella succeeds in crafting many wonderful scenes yet overall, the film can’t add up to more than the sum of its parts.  The central character of the Count is a bit murky and though Fiennes is committed, it is a character that should not seem as uncertain as he does.  Where the film shines is in the details of the scenes, the details given by Minghella in the image.  There is beauty and grandeur in the desert, in the war, in the cave, in the apartment, but it is all taken simply as beauty.  Caravaggio gets onto Hana for romanticizing the Count, but it is his stories that appear to us as romanticized.  Is this because of his description or her reception?  It isn’t clear but they play more as definitive reality than stylized remembrance.  Additionally, there are some portions of his flashbacks that he could not possibly know about (scenes with Katherine and her husband) which strike me as lapses in film logic.  Overall, the film feels very romantic toward the doomed relationship of the Count and Katherine, but the relationship I found most compelling was the one between Hana and Kip.  Hana and Kip’s relationship is based on genuinely expressed affection that comes out in unforced sacrifice and the paradoxical frustration of their allegiances to their particular occupations in the war.  Juliette Binoche and Naveen Andrews are wonderful.  The Count and Katherine’s relationship feels less grounded yet it is presented as the central relationship of the movie.  Perhaps the whole point of his character is that he sacrifices too late, but I found his sacrifice circumstantial, and his whole passivity toward death afterwards to be unjustified.  If he doesn’t care about dying, why try and make Caravaggio’s desire to kill him a potential threat?  The film touches lightly on a few interesting sub-themes including a post-nationalist commentary on war in general and WWII in particular, but it never explores these themes thoroughly.  Overall: a very ho-hum affair with sweeping imagery.

The Freedom of Capital: Milos Forman's Portrait of Larry Flynt

The People vs. Larry Flynt (Milos Forman, 1996)
It is easy to embrace The People vs. Larry Flynt as a cinematic defense of freedom of speech or deride it as a botched biopic, but I think Milos Forman is smarter than both of those readings.  The skeleton key for my understanding of Forman is in the obscure Soviet-era aesthetic stiob, which is a form of absurd humor that requires such an over-identification with the object of its parody that it is difficult to tell whether there is sincere support for the object, subtle ridicule or some strange mix of the two.  The clearest practitioner of the form is Paul Verhoeven, though his is lived out in sci-fi movie structure (Total Recall) and genre gaudiness (Starship Troopers) that openly embraces the absurdity of its aesthetic (RoboCop).  Forman, on the other hand, is a smuggler, embracing the more conventional structure of Hollywood pictures (Amadeus) and subverting them slyly through his depiction of off-kilter subjects (Man on the Moon).  This has led to more universal acclaim for Forman among mainstream critics and an apathetic disinterest in Forman by many serious critics and cinephiles. 

1999 Cii Movie Awards

This list and awards compiled March 4 2013

                      For the criteria of choosing the awards, click here.

Top 10 Films of 1999

1. Three Kings (David O. Russell)
2. Man on the Moon (Milos Forman)
3. The Straight Story (David Lynch)
4. The Insider (Michael Mann)
5. Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson)
6. Bringing Out the Dead (Martin Scorsese)
7. Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze)
8. The Wind Will Carry Us (Abbas Kiarostami)
9. The Matrix (Andy Wachowski & Lana Wachowski)
10. Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick)

Honorable Mentions: Go (Doug Liman), Limbo (John Sayles), Fight Club (David Fincher), Toy Story 2 (John Lasseter & Ash Brannon), Election (Alexander Payne), Cradle Will Rock (Tim Robbins), The Iron Giant (Brad Bird)

Best Actor

* Jim Carrey – Man on the Moon

Russell Crowe – The Insider

Tom Cruise – Eyes Wide Shut

Richard Farnsworth – The Straight Story

Mark Wahlberg – Three Kings

Best Actress

Annette Bening – American Beauty

* Nicole Kidman – Eyes Wide Shut

Julianne Moore – The End of the Affair

Hilary Swank – Boys Don’t Cry

Reese Witherspoon – Election

Best Supporting Actor

Tom Cruise – Magnolia

* Philip Seymour Hoffman – Magnolia

John Malkovich – Being John Malkovich

Christopher Plummer – The Insider

Ving Rhames – Bringing Out the Dead

Tom Sizemore – Bringing Out the Dead

Best Supporting Actress

Toni Collette – The Sixth Sense

Cameron Diaz – Being John Malkovich

Katie Holmes – Go

* Catherine Keener – Being John Malkovich

Samantha Morton – Sweet & Lowdown

Melora Walters – Magnolia

Best Director

Spike Jonze – Being John Malkovich

Stanley Kubrick – Eyes Wide Shut

* David Lynch – The Straight Story

Michael Mann – The Insider

David O. Russell – Three Kings

Best Screenplay

Being John Malkovich (Charlie Kauffman)

Election (Alexander Payne & Jim Taylor)

Go (John August)

* The Insider (Michael Mann & Eric Roth)

Three Kings (David O. Russell)

Best Cinematography

American Beauty (Conrad L. Hall)

Eyes Wide Shut (Larry Smith)

The Insider (Dante Spinotti)

Snow Falling on Cedars (Robert Richardson)

* Three Kings (Newton Thomas Sigel)

Best Editing

Bringing Out the Dead (Thelma Schoonmaker)

* Fight Club (James Haygood)

Go (Stephen Mirrione)

The Insider (William Goldenberg, Paul Rubell & David Rosenbloom)

The Matrix (Zach Staenberg)

Best Film Score

* American Beauty (Thomas Newman)

Being John Malkovich (Carter Burwell)

Eyes Wide Shut (Jocelyn Pook)

Fight Club (Dust Brothers)

Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace (John Williams)

Best Production Design

American Beauty

* The Matrix

The Talented Mr. Ripley

Titus

Topsy-Turvy

Best Ensemble Cast Performance

Cradle Will Rock

Go

The Insider

* Magnolia

Three Kings

1999 Movies Seen (81 features as of 03.04.2013)

8mm (Joel Schumaker, 1999)

American Beauty (Sam Mendes, 1999)

American Pie (Paul Weitz & Chris Weitz, 1999)

Analyze This (Harold Ramis, 1999)

Any Given Sunday (Oliver Stone, 1999)

Arlington Road (Mark Pellington, 1999)

Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (Jay Roach, 1999)

Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze, 1999)

Big Daddy (Dennis Dugan, 1999)

The Big Kahuna (John Swanbeck, 1999)

The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick & Eduardo Sanchez, 1999)

Blast from the Past (Hugh Wilson, 1999)

Bowfinger (Frank Oz, 1999)

Boys Don’t Cry (Kimberly Pierce, 1999)

Bringing Out the Dead (Martin Scorsese, 1999)

The Cider House Rules (Lasse Hallström, 1999)

Cookie’s Fortune (Robert Altman, 1999)

Cradle Will Rock (Tim Robbins, 1999)

Cruel Intentions (Roger Kumble, 1999)

Deep Blue Sea (Renny Harlin, 1999)

Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo (Mike Mitchell, 1999)

Dick (Andrew Fleming, 1999)

Dogma (Kevin Smith, 1999)

EDtv (Ron Howard, 1999)

Election (Alexander Payne, 1999)

The End of the Affair (Neil Jordan, 1999)

End of Days (Peter Hyams, 1999)

Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick, 1999)

Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999)

Forces of Nature (Bronwen Hughes, 1999)

The General’s Daughter (Simon West, 1999)

Girl, Interrupted (James Mangold, 1999)

Go (Doug Liman, 1999)

The Green Mile (Frank Darabont, 1999)

Happy, Texas (Mark Illsley, 1999)

The Hurricane (Norman Jewison, 1999)

In Dreams (Neil Jordan, 1999)

The Insider (Michael Mann, 1999)

Inspector Gadget (David Kellogg, 1999)

Instinct (Jon Turteltaub, 1999)

The Iron Giant (Brad Bird, 1999)

King Gimp (Susan Hannah Hadary & William A. Whiteford, 1999)

Lake Placid (Steve Miner, 1999)

Limbo (John Sayles, 1999)

The Limey (Steven Soderbergh, 1999)

Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999)

Man on the Moon (Milos Forman, 1999)

The Matrix (Andy Wachowski & Larry Wachowski, 1999)

Mickey Blue Eyes (Kelly Makin, 1999)

My Best Fiend (Werner Herzog, 1999)

Mystery Men (Kinka Usher, 1999)

Notting Hill (Roger Mitchell, 1999)

October Sky (Joe Johnston, 1999)

Office Space (Mike Judge, 1999)

Payback (Brian Helgeland, 1999)

Pushing Tin (Mike Newell, 1999)

The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan, 1999)

The Red Violin (François Girard, 1999)

Runaway Bride (Garry Marshall, 1999)

She’s All That (Robert Iscove, 1999)

Sleepy Hollow (Tim Burton, 1999)

Snow Falling on Cedars (Scott Hicks, 1999)

Spectres of the Spectrum (Craig Baldwin, 1999)

South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut (Trey Parker, 1999)

Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (George Lucas, 1999)

Stigmata (Rupert Wainwright, 1999)

The Straight Story (David Lynch, 1999)

Sweet & Lowdown (Woody Allen, 1999)

The Talented Mr. Ripley (Anthony Minghella, 1999)

Tarzan (Chris Buck & Kevin Lima, 1999)

The Thomas Crown Affair (John McTiernan, 1999)

Three Kings (David O. Russell, 1999)

Titus (Julie Taymor, 1999)

Topsy-Turvy (Mike Leigh, 1999)

Toy Story 2 (John Lasseter & Ash Brannon, 1999)

True Crime (Clint Eastwood, 1999)

Tumbleweeds (Gavin O’Connor, 1999)

Varsity Blues (Brian Robbins, 1999)

The Wind Will Carry Us (Abbas Kiarostami, 1999)

Wing Commander (Chris Roberts, 1999)

The World is Not Enough (Michael Apted, 1999)