ANDREW WORSDALE separates the intelligent and stylish from the Dumb and Dumbers in his best and worst of 1995’s movies
IN a year dominated by Jim Carrey at the box- office — The Mask and Dumb and Dumber were the two top-grossing movies in South Africa, earning a combined income of R16,5-million — – there was still a sufficient number of intelligent, well-crafted movies to make going to the cinema a worthwhile reason to get away from the VCR, the American schlock on M-Net and the sport on television. And so, in no particular order at all, here is my choice of the best and worst of the year.
Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction — clever- clever and violently excessive to the point of nausea — was still adrenaline-filled fun and reignited John Travolta’s career with hypodermic intensity. In a similar vein, though on a lesser budget and in a more low- key style, Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects reinvented noir and caper movies with enough flamboyance to capture the arthouse and popular circuits in one bag. Also exploring guts and gore, David Fincher’s Seven, with Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman, managed to be that rare thing — a glossy Hollywood product with enough intelligence and flair to make it disturbing in the way low-budget horror flicks are.
Freeman found another great showcase for his talents in Frank Darabont’s superb adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shawshank Redemption — – a downbeat prison drama with a literate script that left you uplifted and inspired, without being sanctimonious. Another intelligent Hollywood movie was Tim Burton’s biopic Ed Wood, with a stunning performance from Martin Landau as a drug-addicted Bela Lugosi, evocative cinematography and trashy styling and scripting in the vogue of its title character.
Wayne Wang and Paul Aster’s Smoke proved that where there’s smoke there doesn’t have to be fire, just well-crafted stories with believable, interesting characters. And finally from stateside, Luc Besson moved to New York courtesy of Columbia pictures and made the best action picture of the year with his tale of Leon, The Professional, knocking slugfests like Assassins (pretentious, predictable), Desperado (precocious, boring) and Die Hard with a Vengeance (the third- highest-grossing pic of the year with a stupefying performance from Jeremy Irons chewing up New York) right out of the arena.
The United Kingdom also made some pretty good movies. Danny Boyle’s chilling Glaswegian shocker, Shallow Grave, had to be the nastiest modestly-budgeted hipster horror movie of the year, while Antonia Bird’s Priest, with its earnest exploration of Catholicism and sexuality, proved that sensationalism doesn’t have to be vacant. And Mike Leigh’s Naked, in its night-time meeting between drifter David Thewlis and a security guard, had the most perfectly observed 30 minutes of movie drama in the year.
Once again, the Antipodeans showed their strength in making successful individualistic movies. Lee Tamahori’s Once Were Warriors was a stunning but gruelling look at inner-city and domestic strife in the Maori community. On a lesser note, The Sum of Us, a trenchant gay comedy; Muriel’s Wedding, a slightly vapid but engaging comedy about marriage and kitsch; and Heavenly Creatures, a quirky yet blackly comic look at a Fifties family murder, reminded us locals again that we just have to get off our butts and make our own stories. Instead we got the insipid RDP comedy of David Lister and Mfundi Vundla’s Soweto Green, which bombed at the box office, barely scraping past the half- million mark. The three Australian movies scored well over R3-million combined.
Which brings us to the real honours: the crappest movies of the year, and, what’s worse, the most disappointing. First to mind is Dominic Sena’s Kalifornia, going as the best-shot anamorphic music video of all time with the most ludicrous plot of the century (would you believe: an irksome yuppie couple with a large collection of Leicas, Nikons and Polaroids need to give a sleazy serial killer and his chick a ride to the east coast in order to save bucks on petrol?).
Other dross included Robert Redford’s sickeningly liberal, Oscar-grabbing Quiz Show; Danny Cannon’s flashy, vacuous The Young Americans, with Harvey Keitel acting like a Big Mac trying to find matching French fries and a large coke in the clublands of London; and Cannon’s dreadfully overwrought Judge Dredd, which reconfirmed Sylvester Stallone as action-bimbo of the decade. Cannon shares my vote as most overrated Young Turk of the year with Robert (Desperado) Rodriguez.
Gary Marshall’s abortive adaptation of Anne Rice’s Exit to Eden demonstrated that Hollywood’s desensitisation of “rude” material (in this case S&M and sexual therapy) just produces glossy abortions. And then there were David Salle’s Search and Destroy, which some of Gauteng’s artistic demi-monde actually enjoyed for its unimpeachable pretentiousness, and, of course, Tobe Hooper’s The Mangler, which featured some of Gauteng’s dramatic demi-monde adding fuel to a laboured and rather childish Gothic adventure.
Box-office receipts indicated that Mr and Mrs Joe Public don’t care about content when they munch on popcorn in the dark. Apart from the Carrey movies, the top-grossing movies of the year were Die Hard with a Vengeance (R6,6m), Casper (R6m), Bad Boys (R5,7m), Disclosure (R5,6m), Legends of the Fall (R5,2m), Braveheart (R4,7m), Color of Night (R4,7m) and Streetfighter (R4,3m).
If it’s any encouragement to those in the local industry, Darrell Roodt’s lavish, respectable if a little bit preachy, reworking of Cry, the Beloved Country has earned a decent 2,4-million bucks — and it’s still playing. Now maybe his next movie, an action- packed, funky drug-fest tentatively titled The Spear, might just produce the kind of local receipts we can be proud of.