A Protestant among Catholics, a woman in a man’s world, and a new servant in the established ranks of the busy, precariously prosperous Vermeer household, she keeps her hair covered and her head low. As the film opens, its eponymous heroine, beautifully played by Scarlett Johansson, seems incapable of her immortal expression, or even of looking anyone else in the eye. Īdapting Tracy Chevalier’s novel, Girl With A Pearl Earring seeks not so much to clear up the mysteries Johannes Vermeer’s painting as to capture more moments of pregnant ambiguity where lives find their potential, and to show the unspoken codes that keep that potential in check. Those performances, combined with the Dust Brothers’ trippy score and Fincher’s customarily confident visual flair (bringing the IKEA catalog to life with the rhythmic population of Norton’s apartment, for example), cemented Fight Club as a cult classic to be feverishly consumed (and misunderstood) for years to come. The push-pull magnetism between the pair adds emotional depth to scenes that masquerade as mere masculine posturing, and Helena Bonham Carter’s Marla Singer, with her own brand of anti-establishment survivalism, is the film’s secret weapon. Edward Norton’s wonderfully unhinged performance meets its match in Brad Pitt, who brings gleeful mania to Tyler Durden’s personified id. That reading misses the point of David Fincher’s adaptation of the satirical Chuck Palahniuk novel, which addresses legitimate concerns about culture commodification, cannibalistic capitalism, and increasing social isolation but ultimately argues we shouldn’t give into our darkest impulses when trying to change the world. Since basically flopping at the box office, Fight Club has been widely misinterpreted as a sincere glorification of male violence. Cult movies come and go, but like its hero, The Big Lebowski abides. Slow-motion shots of middle-aged men bowling are choreographed and scored as artfully as anything in Stanley Kubrick’s oeuvre, in a comedy that gave pop culture one of its quintessential antiheroes and created an absurd and insanely detailed universe. Like Bridges’ performance, The Big Lebowski only appears effortless: The slacker facade and shaggy-dog plotting-with its surplus of red herrings, dead ends, and seemingly pointless digressions-belie the film’s underlying meticulousness and manic perfectionism. The Big Lebowski created an entire subculture of tongue-in-cheek “achievers” who dress up like the film’s characters and attend “Lebowski Fests” where they drink white Russians, bowl, and recite favorite lines. The film was released to mixed reviews, modest box-office, and widespread confusion before beginning a strange journey to becoming the cult film of the ’90s, the Rocky Horror Picture Show of its time. When the Coen brothers followed up their Academy Award-winning breakthrough hit Fargo (a film deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” by no less an authority than the United States National Film Registry) with a shaggy stoner lark about the world’s most unlikely and least qualified would-be shamus ( Jeff Bridges as “The Dude,” the signature role of his magnificent career) and his mock-heroic quest to retrieve a missing rug that famously held the whole room together, it felt like one of the smartass brothers’ inside jokes. įrom our list of the best movies of the ’90s : For while Apollo 13 was a doomed mission, Apollo 13-directed by the kid who just finished playing Opie Taylor, you inform the ’69ers, ensuring that they’ll dismiss your entire crazy story-exemplifies studio filmmaking at its finest, throwing money, talent, and craft at the problem in much the same way that NASA worked collectively to save its astronauts. Actually, the word “attempt” alone would likely inspire sufficient alarm to alter the course of history, saving everyone a lot of anxiety and hassle, albeit at the cost of depriving the world (or perhaps some alternate/parallel universe) of a terrific film. Imagine hopping into a time machine, traveling back to mid-July of 1969, stopping by NASA, and telling folks there that half a century later, there still won’t be a big-budget Hollywood movie about humanity first setting foot on the moon (only a TV miniseries, which wouldn’t sound remotely prestigious three years before HBO even launched, and a Neil Armstrong biopic), but that there will be a popular, Oscar-winning movie about the third attempt to travel there.
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