Rose in a Cesspool
Submitted by Cosgrove on Wed, 11/17/2004 - 13:16
Tags:
- Eric Bana [Chopper]
- Annette Bening [What Planet Are You From?]
- Dirk Bogarde [The Night Porter]
- Jim Carrey [Man on the Moon]
- Benicio Del Toro [21 Grams]
- Johnny Depp [Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; From Hell; Secret Window]
- Vin Diesel [Pitch Black]
- Maud Forget [Mauvaises frequentations]
- Rutger Hauer [The Hitcher]
- Ethan Hawke [Taking Lives]
- Bryce Dallas Howard [The Village]
- John Huston [Winter Kills]
- Hugh Jackman [Kate and Leopold]
- Harvey Keitel [Bad Lieutenant]
- Jude Law [Gattaca]
- William H. Macy [Panic]
- Brittany Murphy [Girl, Interrupted]
- Tim Blake Nelson [Cherish]
- Sandra Oh [Dancing at the Blue Iguana]
- Terry O'Quinn [The Stepfather]
- Piper Perabo [Lost and Delirious]
- Anthony Perkins [Psycho III]
- Joaquin Phoenix [8MM]
- Peter Sarsgaard [Flightplan]
- Nick Stahl [Bully]
- Sylvie Testud [Murderous Maids]
- Jon Voight [Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2]
Author Comments:
Or, when good performances happen to otherwise crummy movies. (The list title refers to Leonard Maltin's assessment of Linda Kerridge's performance in "Fade to Black".)
i thought what planet are you from was a good movie... pretty funny... "shit i'm bleeding"
I thought the first half was pretty funny, actually. There's no excuse for that second half though. Nobody should be trying to mine pathos from a movie about an emotionless alien with a vibrating schlong.
good point
Good list, although I'd like to propose a hattrick of disagreement:
1. Chopper (good)
2. Gattaca (very good)
3. Panic (great)
Actually, I liked 8MM too, but I wanted to use the word "hattrick."
I would agree with Jim that Panic is a great movie. I also liked 21 Grams, but not enough to argue about it (but I thought Naomi Watts was at least as good as Del Toro, if not better).
I knew "Panic" had its fans here when I put it on this list. All I can say is I really don't know what you guys see in it. The precocious kid character alone was enough to sink the film for me.
"Chopper" is a film I really should have liked, so you can imagine how confused and stunned I was when I didn't. I'm still not sure why I think it's a bad movie, but that's the way it is. And "Gattaca"... feh. It's a triumph of art direction and that's it. Law provides the only spark of like in what's otherwise a sterile and plastic film.
And it's funny about the Watts performnce in "21 Grams"... I often find myself impressed by big, actor-y performances, but something about Watts in that film struck me as too showy, too gimme-an-Oscar broad. The thing I liked about Del Toro is that he gave the film all its best moments and he didn't even seem to be trying.
There is another movie that seems perfectly fit to this list "In Dreams", the one in which Robert Downey Jr. mind melds with Annette Benning in an off-putting psuedo-sexual way (Downey has way too much hair and what the hell was with the apples?). The movie is terrible, and I mean TERRIBLE. Annette Benning is fantastic in this film, (really) I have stated on many an occassion that she should've won the oscar for this performance but it's in such a crap movie nobody really gave her the time of day.
T'ho
:?)
Yeah, "In Dreams" is such crap. I don't remember being terribly impressed by Benning, but then the fact that she was able to keep a straight face while being attacked by apples deserves some kind of special award all by itself.
I'd always heard that The Stepfather was one of those little-seen classics of the genre. I guess not, huh? I'm happy to hear that Terry O'Quinn is good, tho; he's always been a great, overlooked actor. Maybe he'll be able to snag an Emmy for Lost.
That's what I'd heard as well. But it's not. It's just a mediocre B-movie that happens to have an excellent performance by a journeyman actor that probably confused a lot of people into thinking they were watching something more than a standard potboiler.
You have seriously misjudged Pitch Black and Gattaca. They both have redeeming philosophical depths, and, apart from that, are not bad entertainment.
I'm gonna hafta disagree -- IMO, "Pitch Black" is just another shrill "Night of the Living Dead" clone but in space, and "Gattaca" is portentous sci-fi dross that isn't as deep as it thinks it is. Different strokes and all that.
If you'd said PB was an 'Aliens' clone I could see where you were coming from, but I see very little similarity between PB and the 'Living Dead' schtick.
PB would be a very useful discussion movie to show a class studying ethics or philosophy of religion. The female pilot faces a string of situations that raise interesting ethical questions. Also, the Islamic father stands in for Job in facing the Problem of Evil. Further still, there is the ethical aspect of the character played by Vin Diesel - hero or villain or both?.
At the very least, Gattaca is valuable for bringing the ethics and politics of genetic technology to the screen.
"Gattaca" may be valuable for bringing the ethics and politics of genetic technology to the screen, but that doesn't change the fact that it's not a good movie.
And "Pitch Black" is struck directly from the "NOTLD" template: Several diverse strangers, on the run from some supernatural horror, hole up in a claustrophobic location and bicker at each other about what to do until said horror breaches the safety of the hideout and kills almost everybody. The only real difference is that the zombie menace has been replaced with large alien critters. And I have no idea what you're talking about with the ethics thing, but bully for you for finding it there.