Top Ten 1990s
Tuesday, April 9, 2013 at 11:50PM I promised longtime TFE super fan Ryan that I would one day write up a big top ten of the 90s piece although THIS IS NOT IT. This is like those tossed back "shots" of past decades wherein we tell each other our favorites. I'll tell you my ten favorites which are wildly unstable and could be replaced by anything in the "with apologies to" list if I'd ranked on another day. Well, not the top three. I mean... let's not get crazy.
- The Piano (Jane Campion)
- Boogie Nights (Paul Thomas Anderson)
- Thelma & Louise (Ridley Scott)
- Heavenly Creatures (Peter Jackson)
- Beauty & The Beast (Trousdale & Wise)
- All About My Mother (Pedro Almodóvar)
- Trois Coleurs Trilogy (Krystof Kzielowski)
- T2: Judgment Day (James Cameron)
- Fargo (The Coen Bros)
- Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino)
Most of them weren't even nominated for Best Picture. (Sigh). Oscar is so...
With apologies to 15 more. Let's call it a top 25:
Being John Malkovich, Titanic, [safe], Howards End, The Thin Red Line, Se7en, The Truman Show, Schindler's List, The Silence of the Lambs, Postcards from the Edge, Edward Scissorhands, The Grifters, Waiting for Guffman, Husbands and Wives, and Election.
other "favs" if not all of them as 'respectable':
Death Becomes Her, Babe, Ed Wood, Dead Man Walking, Strictly Ballroom, Tie Me Up Tie Me Down, A League of Their Own, Addams Family Values, Bullets Over Broadway, Reality Bites, Queen Margot, Clueless, Romeo + Juliet, My Best Friend's Wedding, Wings of the Dove, Celebration, The Idiots, High Art, Velvet Goldmine, Run Lola Run, My Own Private Idaho, Priest, The Fisher King, Leaving Las Vegas and The Last of the Mohicans.
P.S. After Jurassic Park (best shot tomorrow night!), I promise we'll leave the 90s behind and come back to the now. So get it all out of your system in the comments!
Reader Comments (76)
A very interesting decade indeed
I'd say, and like everyone else this could freely change whenever.
1. Magnolia - Paul Thomas Anderson
2. Fargo - The Coens
3. Secrets & Lies - Mike Leigh
4. Swoon - Tom Kalin
5. Wild at Heart - David Lynch
6. Malcolm X - Spike Lee
7. My Own Private Idaho - Gus Van Sant
8. Edward II - Derek Jarman
9. Waiting for Guffman - Christopher Guest
10. The Talented Mr. Ripley - Anthony Minghella
Honorable Mentions: Clueless, Happy Together, Husbands and Wives, Velvet Goldmine, JFK, Ed Wood, Batman Returns, Thelma and Louise
TOP 10 (in alphabetical order):
Being John Malkovich
Boogie Nights
The Bridges of Madison County
Dead Man Walking
Heavenly Creatures
Howards End
The Ice Storm
Paris Is Burning
Sense and Sensibility
Velvet Goldmine
AND FILLING OUT THE TOP 20:
Boys Don't Cry
The Crying Game
The Fifth Element
Flirting with Disaster
Go
Muriel's Wedding
The Opposite of Sex
Out of Sight
The Player
Serial Mom
Shakespeare in Love
Subject to change depending on the day.
1 - The Bridges of Madison County, Clint Eastwood
2 - Heat, Michael Mann
3 - Happy Together, Wong Kar-wai
4 - The River, Tsai Ming-Liang
5 - Life and Nothing More, Abbas Kiarostami
6 - Breaking the Waves, Lars von Trier
7 - Jackie Brown, Quentin Tarantino
8 - The Mirror, Jafar Panahi
9 - Carlito's Way, Brian de Palma
10 - Barton Fink, Joel Coen
One more time, I feel the lack of foreign movies even in the apologies list. There's so much beyond the Oscar world, and the 90's were an astonishing decade to countries like Iran, China, Taiwan... But let's go.
Performances of the decade:
Male:
1 - Kevin Spacey, American Beauty
2 - Sean Penn, Sweet and Lowdown
3 - Tony Leung, Happy Together
4 - Robert De Niro, Heat
5 - Al Pacino, Heat
Female:
1 - Meryl Streep, The Bridges of Madison County
2 - Emily Watson, Breaking the Waves
3 - Juliette Binoche, Bleu
4 - Judy Davis, Husbands and Wives
5 - Cecilia Roth, All About My Mother
Best director of the decade:
1 - Abbas Kiarostami (come on, Close-Up, LIfe and Nothing More, Through the Olive Trees and Taste of Cherry)
2 - Kieslowski (the trilogy + The Double Life of Veronique
3 - Tarantino (Jackie Brown + Pulp Fiction)
4 - WKW (Happy Together, Chungking Express, Ashes of Time)
5 - Joel Coen (Barton Fink, Fargo, Lebowski)
@forever1267- 1999 is so good that I don't think just cutting it to ten movies does it justice. Only 2007 (and perhaps 2011) is a recent year that comes close.
Time to Cheat!!!
1. The Double Life of Veronique
2. Beau Travail/Poison/Happy Together (Homoerotica Double Feature!)
3. Edward Scissorhands/Ed Wood (Burton Double Feature!)
4. Drop Dead Gorgeous/Dick (Dunst Double Feature!)
5. Raise the Red Lantern/Farewell My Concubine (90s Asian Cinema Double Feature!)
6. Metropolitan/Bullets Over Broadway (90s American Cinema Double Feature!)
7.Thelma and Louise/La Ceremonie (Women Behaving Badly Double Feature!)
8. Naked/Showgirls (I Have No Idea How to Connect These Two Double Feature!)
9. The Piano/ A Woman's Tale (Australian Cinema Double Feature!)
10. The Ice Storm/Howard's End (I Always Forget That Ang Lee Didn't Direct Howard's End, So My Frequent Mental Lapses Made It Appropriate To Pair These Two Double Feature!)
Frovin -- I love Lelouch's Les Miserables, too. My sister took me to see it when I visited her once when she was in college. I think it was the first foreign movie I ever went to. Later on, when she was my guardian, she'd often take me to foreign movies. I feel so lucky and grateful to her for introducing me to films out of the mainstream. I wanted to purchase a copy of Lelouch's Les Miserables for both her and me, but I can't find it anywhere in compatible American formats. So sad!
I haven't seen the three colors trilogy yet, but methinks it is cheating to put them all in one spot. Either they are awesome enough to be 3 spots, or you should be able to pick the best one. It drives me crazy when people put LotR trilogy as one entry on a list.
Here's my top 10 movies that I didn't see enough of on people's lists above and deserve more recognition for their greatness:
1. Life is Beautiful
2. Sense and Sensibility
3. The Usual Suspects
4. Magnolia
5. Waiting for Guffman
6. To Live- early Yimou Zhang-so good-watch it!
7. What About Bob?
8. The Sixth Sense
9. Air Force One
10. The War
1. Titanic
2. Beauty and The Beast
3. The Shawshank Redemption
4. Sense and Sensibility
5. Notting Hill
6. Fargo
7. The English Patient
8. Misery
9. The Silence of the Lambs
10. Run Lola Run
After looking through the other posts more thoroughly, I must add:
Searching for Bobby Fisher
It is wonderful.
Also, I think only one person so far has listed Forest Gump. I find that interesting.
Cal:
Top Five Lead Actors of 90s:
1. Al Pacino, Glengarry Glen Ross
2. Kevin Spacey, The Usual Suspects
3. John Cusack, Grosse Pointe Blank
4. Johnny Depp, Edward Scissorhands
5. Aaron Eckhart, In the Company of Men (the ending scene is redundant in a cinematic context due to Eckhart's flawless work)
(6: Jim Broadbent, Topsy-Turvy)
Top Five Lead Actresses of 90s:
1. Brenda Blethyn, Secrets & Lies
2. Michelle Pfeiffer, Batman Returns
3. Julianne Moore, Safe
4. Patricia Arquette, True Romance
5. Lili Taylor, The Addiction
Top Five Supporting Actors of 90s:
1. John Turturro, Miller's Crossing
2. Ralph Fiennes, Schindler's List
3. Donald Sutherland, JFK
4. Michael Madsen, Reservoir Dogs
5. Martin Landau, Ed Wood
Top Five Supporting Actresses of 90s:
1. Kirsten Dunst, Interview with the Vampire
2. Drew Barrymore, Scream
3. Annabella Sciorra, The Addiction
4. Joan Cusack, Grosse Pointe Blank
5. Famke Jannsen, GoldenEye
Surprised to see The Age of Innocence keep popping up here and there. Glad to see someone else enjoys it as much as I do.
1. Gattaca
2. Jackie Brown
3. American History X
4. Se7en
5. Goodfellas
6. Fargo
7. The Shawshank Redemption
8. Toy Story
9. The Sweet Hereafter
10. Miller's Crossing
Volvagia, I hear you, but if I left out every disturbing or offensive scene I've ever seen, "Boys Don't Cry" would never have made the list--and in my 80's list, David Lynch's "Blue Velvet" wouldn't have made the cut. Neither would the gorgeous, horrifying, heartbreaking "Last Exit to Brooklyn" or the creepy-crawly "Apartment Zero."
I love Ang Lee's "The Ice Storm," but I went with the more generous-spirited of those two films, though "Sense and Sensibility" should be right in there as well. (I also neglected "Three Kings" "Thelma and Louise" "L.A. Confidential" "Aladdin" "Groundhog Day" "The Thomas Crown Affair" "Go" "Good Will Hunting" "Short Cuts" "My Own Private Idaho" and "Out Of SIght" to mention just another 10.)
My top 10 in random order
The Long Day Closes (Terrence Davies)
Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick)
Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese)
The Piano (Jane Campion)
Princess Mononoke (Hayao Miyazaki)
Election (Alexander Payne)
Babe & Babe: Pig in the City (George Miller) YES!!! I know right!
Heat (Michael Mann)
Safe (Todd Haynes)
Close Up (Abbas Kiarostami)
An excellent Top '25' - with the exceptions of the awful T2 and Pulp Fiction.
I must be the only person on the planet that absolutely HATED these 2 films.
Otherwise your list is pretty close to mine.
Oh, and I HOW could I have forgotten Davies' transcendent "The Long Day Closes"!! That's one for the all-time list! (Thank you gbocampo!)
I probably should've ranked "Goodfellas" and "Pulp Fiction" higher, but I now (unfairly) remember them as ultra-viiolent gangster pictures, when obviously they're much more than that. Way too many mob and Tarantino-esque movies over the past 20+ years have stained my mind.
Dback: My issue with The Wedding Banquet doesn't have to do with "evil things being shown", but with "evil things being shown with the wrong moral framing." I haven't seen Last Exit or Apartment Zero, but in Blue Velvet and Boys Don't Cry (actually EXCELLENT counter examples to show how badly The Wedding Banquet fumbles it's ending), the characters doing evil things are draped in shadow and are, therefore, visually framed as monsters. In The Wedding Banquet, there are no visual or plot consequences for what Wei-Wei does, indicating the film is actually completely OKAY with a central sympathetic character comitting an act of rape.
Ugh I forgot to mention Showgirls and hhe most recent 90s movies I fell for: raise the Red Lantern
Yes, I said Serial Mom.
And Bette Streep, you are certainly not alone (although I only hate one of the two).
I also forgot Romy & Michelle (something makes me laugh the whole way through), Three Kings, and The Last Days of Disco (a movie I can watch over and over again).
1. The Grifters
2. Schindler's List
3. Unforgiven
4. Husbands and Wives
5. The Silence of the Lambs
6. What About Bob?
7. Ed Wood
8. Howards End
9. Jackie Brown
10. Serial Mom
I also LOVE LOVE LOVE Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion. I can watch it over and over! "Well, I invented post-its."
W.J. - gattaca at number one? I've never seen that placed so high but I do like it. Love the production design which is so different than most future films -- the dystopia being clean and orderly as opposed to postapocalyptic
10. Thelma & Louise
9. The Shawshank Redemption
8. Get On the Bus
7. Misery
6. Serial Mom
5. What's Love Got to Do With It
4. Love Jones
3. Boyz N the Hood
2. Malcolm X
1. To Sleep with Anger
Honorable Mentions: Breakdown, Dead Presidents, Election, Fargo, The Fugitive, Hoop Dreams, Jason's Lyric, Just Another Girl On The IRT, New Jack City, One False Move, Set It Off, Sister Act, Titanic, The Truman Show, The War of the Roses
01. The Piano
02. The Silence of the Lambs
03. American Beauty
04. The Talented Mr. Ripley
05. The English Patient
06. Leaving Las Vegas
07. Pulp Fiction
08. Titanic
09. L.A. Confidential
10. Scream
HONORABLE MENTIONS: GoodFellas * The Thin Red Line * Fargo * The Crying Game * Schindler’s List * Boys Don’t Cry * Breaking the Waves * Eyes Wide Shut * Thelma & Louise *
1. AMERICAN BEAUTY
2. SAFE
3. THE PIANO
4.) THE THIN RED LINE
5.) THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS
6.) GOODFELLAS
7.) L.A. CONFIDENTIAL
8.) THELMA & LOUISE
9.) T2
10.) THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY
Best actress Emma Thompson for Howards End.
Best actress in supporting role Emma Thompson for In the Name of the Father.