By Jonathan Rosenbaum
Calling for movies that don’t insult the audience obviously wasn’t even thought worth mentioning, and for a good reason. The operative, if unspoken, theory behind all three of the stratagems outlined is that audiences can be insulted from now to doomsday as long as the pictures are promoted correctly and widely enough–self-fulfilling prophecy at work. So there was no reason to conclude that The Scarlet Letter failed because audiences knew it was a ridiculous piece of tripe; the problem was simply that the promotional machinery faltered.
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I hope I’ll be forgiven for eliminating all studio pictures from my ten-best list. This isn’t hard to do because four of the serious contenders–The Bridges of Madison County, Dolores Claiborne, Seven, and Nobody’s Fool–were more than adequately publicized, were seen by just about everybody who wanted to see them, and are not appreciably better than the titles on my list, most of which were underexposed. The only other serious contenders were Arizona Dream, Emir Kusturica’s cockeyed view of America (which received its U.S. premiere at the Film Center in January, long before the cut version turned up on cable–another victim of studio mishandling, by Warners), In the Mouth of Madness, John Carpenter’s scary venture into Stephen King and David Lynch territory; Carl Franklin’s juicy and instructive adaptation of a Walter Mosley period mystery, Devil in a Blue Dress; and Soderbergh’s The Underneath, a brilliant if flawed remake of the noir thriller Criss Cross–a picture I’m eliminating for the same reason so many of my colleagues are eliminating it: to keep the marketing people at Universal happy. I hope they’re properly grateful.
Latcho Drom. The movie that afforded me the greatest amount of pleasure was an exuberant Gypsy musical in ‘Scope and stereo that turned up at the Music Box in February and apparently did so well–as I’m told it did in other major American cities–that it had at least a couple of return engagements later in the year. Indeed, I suspect that the only reason it’s not yet available on video is that it still has some theatrical life left–despite the apparently total indifference shown it by most high-profile reviewers, who tried to convince you week after week that the latest Hollywood snoozefests were more entertaining. Maybe they just didn’t like Gypsies–a couple of my leftist friends didn’t (they were impressed by the film but liked it less than I did). Or maybe they were put off by the film’s sheer originality and resistance to categorization, or by its high degree of emotion and energy. Neither a narrative film nor a documentary in any usual sense, and eschewing narration almost entirely, Tony Gatlif’s lively screen epic spans three continents, eight countries, and about ten centuries in its casual charting of Gypsy history through different forms of music and dance, giving the movie a formal and visceral excitement no Hollywood movie–including the contenders listed above–came close to. But it doesn’t have Brad Pitt in it, so I suppose that’s that.
Safe. As long as we’re talking about visual style, here’s a movie by an aggressive independent, Todd Haynes, who can probably say more with the way he positions his camera and with the lenses he uses–and with the way he layers and processes his sound track–than with what he has his characters say. In fact, what these spooky characters talk about in this mysterious art movie about emptiness in the wealthy LA suburbs of the San Fernando Valley is “environmental illness,” but I persist in thinking that this was only the raison d’etre for his desperate heroine (Julianne Moore) and his story line, not his true subject (which remains creepy and nameless). Turning up briefly at the Music Box in July, Safe raised so many interesting questions that critics tended to contradict one another when they tried to answer them. But the spacious rooms, front lawns, and gardens in this movie linger in the mind like gaping, devouring caves–visual tropes that will remain in my memory long after I’ve forgotten everything about The Bridges of Madison County and Seven. Too bad most people missed this when it breezed through town, but it will probably be out soon on video, if it isn’t already.
