4 Best Movies To Watch After The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996)
Rules of Engagement
Even William Friedkin's most loyal fans would admit the Nineties were not a particularly fertile artistic period for him. That decade saw him putting out the laughable horror film The Guardian (1990), the eventual release of his long-on-the-shelf and heavily recut 1987 death penalty drama Rampage (1992), the tepid sports drama Blue Chips (1994), and the resoundingly unnecessary (save for a nifty car chase) Jade (1995). On the small screen, he helmed two made-for-cable remakes, the Roger Corman production Jailbreakers (1994) with Shannen Doherty, Antonio Sabato Jr., and Adrien Brody, and 12 Angry Men (1997) with a powerhouse cast that included Jack Lemmon, George C. Scott, Ossie Davis, James Gandolfini and, perhaps inevitably, Tony Danza. Continue Reading →
Singles
Most of Generation X has received our AARP memberships in the mail, as our lurching journey down the road towards irrelevance comes to an end. Both the smallest generation in numbers, and the first generation to not do better than our parents financially, we’ve long been caught in the middle of the endless battle for dominance between Boomers and Millennials, and now with Gen Z steamrolling over them both, we’re fading out of the cultural picture altogether, like Marty McFly’s brother and sister. Continue Reading →
친구엄마
The legendary filmmaker's last bow is a fascinating misfire starring Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon (and a bonkers Klaus Kinski). There are some movies that receive critical scorn and commercial indifference upon the time of their initial release, only to find their reputations rehabilitated with the passing of time and reevaluation. That hasn’t been the case with Billy Wilder’s 1981 dark comedy Buddy Buddy; if anything, its reputation has actually gotten worse over the years — and it wasn’t exactly starting off from a high point. When it was released as part of the crowded 1981 holiday season, it was slaughtered by critics as a vulgar and cheap-looking exercise in tedium from a legendary filmmaker who seemed profoundly out of touch with contemporary cinema. Audiences pretty much completely ignored it. To make things worse, the film proved to be the finale of Wilder’s long and celebrated career (though he would at one point make an attempt to adapt Schindler’s List before Steven Spielberg made it). On the rare reappraisal of Buddy Buddy —mostly in biographies and retrospective articles on Wilder—it’s generally decried as a sad ending to a brilliant career, a prime example of the perils of working long past your prime. Continue Reading →
Sid and Nancy
By most accounts, Alex Cox’s Sid & Nancy is not a particularly accurate depiction of the relationship between Sid Vicious, the most notorious member of the Sex Pistols, and Nancy Spungen, the American with whom he had a relationship that began in a state of anarchy, was sealed in a haze of drugs and ended with him allegedly stabbing her to death in a bathroom only a few months before he would himself die of a heroin overdose at the age of 21. Continue Reading →