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Best Films of 98? Bet You Haven't Seen Them.

By J Rosenbaum
Posted Monday, Dec. 28, 1998, at 6:10 PM ET

Dear David:

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Thanks for your kind words as well as your invitation to participate in this holiday exercise. I can't guarantee that what follows won't strike you as wacko, but I'll do my best to make my style friendly--or at the very least duly belligerent, depending on the issues involved.

Although I've already written a ten-best column of my own for the Chicago Reader that won't run until early next year, that's a list with somewhat different ground rules than yours, because unlike most of my Chicago colleagues, I've decided to restrict my list to films that showed in Chicago in 1998. This means that I can't consider such films as Rushmore, The Thin Red Line, or Affliction--all of which were screened for the Chicago press this year but won't open before 1999--simply because distributors consider Chicagoans demographically irrelevant in 1998 (at least in comparison to their counterparts in New York and Los Angeles), but ripe for the picking in 1999. But in any event, I don't want to duplicate work that I've already done for the Reader in this space. Since we're both communicating now in what might be called national as opposed to local cyberspace, I'd rather direct part of my attention to what creates and legislates that space when it comes to selecting favorite movies.

What do I mean by this? I've been travelling quite a bit this year--14 trips out of Chicago, eight of these outside the United States--probably something of a record for me. And I've seen movies on all of these trips. So if I were to come up with a list that accurately reflected the best new movies I saw this year, I'd have to include a good many movies that you've probably never heard of, or else have heard of but not seen. For starters, I'd have to include Inquietude (inadequately rendered in English as Anxiety), a sublime three-part feature by the oldest living filmmaker who's still working, the Portuguese writer-director Manoel de Oliveira. He just turned 90 earlier this month and is already at work on another feature, an adaptation of La Princesse des Cleves starring Chiara Mastroianni; he's the only filmmaker we have left, to the best of my knowledge, who started out in the silent era. But I hasten to add that these remarkable facts have only a little to do with what I love about Inquietude; there are other recent films by de Oliveira that I don't much like at all, and still others that I like without finding them sublime or major--including The Convent and Voyage To the Beginning of the World, the only two that have received U.S. distribution. What I love about Inquietude is the dovetailing interaction between the three stories it adapts (the first story is a one-act play seen by characters in the second story, and the third is recounted by one of these characters in the second story to another), all revolving around the issue of existential identity but otherwise quite different; the exquisite lighting and cinematography; the stately and musical qualities of the mise en scene; and, maybe most of all, the fact that de Oliveira refuses to act like a benign sage but comments on the world with witty and iconoclastic sarcasm, taking nothing for granted. In any case, this movie happens to occupy first place in my list for the Chicago Reader because it actually showed there at the local film festival (although I happened to see it twice in Toronto and a third time in Providence); it hasn't yet made it to New York or, to the best of my knowledge, anywhere else in the United States.

I realize I'm running the risk of boring you silly by enthusing over something not available at your local multiplex or video store, but I also can't deny that Inquietude has given me more to think about, savor, and feel grateful for than any other 1998 title I could cite. So I'll simply mention rather than try to explore the revelation of Lu Yue's Mr. Zhao, a mainland Chinese feature about adultery with improvised dialogue, clearly influenced by John Cassavetes, that won the top prize at the Locarno film festival in August and, as far as I know, hasn't surfaced anywhere else since then. Let's call both Inquietude and Mr. Zhao dysfunctional masterpieces simply because they're not on the marketplace and therefore can't be discussed very functionally within an American context--a context in which distributors, not critics, are the true arbiters of taste and the setters of our cultural agendas.

To be fair, most of my other favorite 1998 movies--movies like Taste of Cherry, Small Soldiers, Pleasantville, The Thin Red Line, Rushmore, and The Apple--don't fall into this invisible category (although one might argue that the satire of Small Soldiers was seemingly invisible to most American critics, and one can't truly equate the visibility of studio product and that of Iranian cinema in the American marketplace ). Although none of the 10 titles on your list could appear on mine, I feel fairly warm and sympathetic to the first and last; There's Something About Mary belatedly converted me to the Farrelly brothers' cause, and Living Out Loud, which I belatedly caught up with on video, does a better job with urban desperation than most movies of that ilk. I also find Out of Sight agreeable insofar as I find Jennifer Lopez agreeable, and I could give a certain amount of grudging approval to the first half hour of Saving Private Ryan (but not enough to put it anywhere near my list of favorites, none of which pummel me into submission. How can you honestly respect or endorse a movie that does that to you?) I haven't seen Enemy of the State or The Opposite of Sex, and nothing I've heard so far about either (apart from the presence of Christina Ricci in the second) has convinced me that I should. This leaves only Velvet Goldmine, The Butcher Boy, Happiness, and Buffalo 66 as movies we radically disagree about, although even in these cases I'm sure we'd find some points of agreement.

For instance, I was thoroughly entertained by the glitter and punch of Velvet Goldmine, even if the absence of characters left me with a feeling of hollowness at the end. (Haynes's Safe does all sorts of things with hollowness to make it fascinating, but for me the sophomoric conceit about Oscar Wilde at the beginning of the new picture is all too characteristic of the glibness that follows.) And I was never bored for an instant in Happiness, the American independent cinema's equivalent to the Starr report, even if the self-loathing laughter it prompted all around me--which reminded me of what I mistrust about Michael Moore and loathe about Woody Allen--kept me cringing even while I was engrossed. For that matter, I admire the boldness of some of the formal ideas in Buffalo 66 almost as much as I detest the boldness of Gallo's sense of entitlement as a movie star, at least as it's manifested in the movie. It's been about 16 months since I've seen The Butcher Boy, which I found simply (albeit thoroughly) unpleasant and not especially interesting, but maybe I missed something.

Maybe I'm buzzing around here over too many issues. The saddest thing for me about your top 10 list is my conviction that, if that's all movies had to offer in 1998, I'd rather be doing something else for a living. But of course I think the best movies I see are offering a lot more than cheerful teenage grossout humor and various other forms of adolescent gratification, which is the quality that appears to connect to the majority of your favorites. Or am I missing something here, too?

Best,
Jonathan