This is a follow-up to the two previous installments of Selected Takes. In 1996, I started keeping a record of films I saw. Initially, I wrote notes for each film expressing my reactions to them, but eventually wrote less and less until I basically stopped sometime in 2001. Got lazy. I wrote these just for myself and had no thought or intention at the time that they might one day be released into the wild, so to speak. The films from 1998 in this post aren’t the only ones I saw that year, far from it, just those I wrote about and want to include here.

As before, when I mention a Sony or Loews theater, these are now AMC. Except for minor edits and a few notations, I’ve left these entries as they were originally, though I’ve added posters and several clips..

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1/1. AFTERGLOW at the Regency. Another quirky film from Alan Rudolph, quirky in irritating ways. Very stylized dialogue, which bugged me. Lara Flynn Boyle’s performance was another problem. Nick Nolte and Julie Christie were pretty good, more grounded in reality. Thought the stuff about their daughter who’d left them 8 years before, and how that continued to hang over their heads, had the most power, especially when Nolte actually runs into her near the end, and then we see her show up at Nolte and Christie’s home at the very end. But the rest of it was very problematic for me, very uneven. Though I liked it more as it went on, not quite sure why.

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1/23. THE GINGERBREAD MAN at Lincoln Square. Pretty conventional film for Robert Altman. First hour or so is good, involving; then it gets frantic and unlikely. Kenneth Branagh is good, as is Robert Downey Jr. Robert Duvall is good in the courtroom scene. Didn’t even recognize Daryl Hannah. Forgot she was in it until I saw her name in the final credits roll. The continuous opening shot under the main credits is amazing. Turns out to be an aerial shot of country near Savannah, though takes a while for that to become clear. Something about it is just magical. It’s hard to describe the effect. Thought first it might be a shot of a model landscape, then when the road and car appears was surprised that it was at a much lower altitude than I thought. Overall, though, the film shows very little of Altman’s stamp.

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1/28. DON’T LOOK BACK at Film Forum. Hadn’t seen this for quite a while. Glad I caught it again. Really fascinating seeing Dylan at this period (England tour 1965) of his life and career. This movie will always be memorable for me as the first time I heard the word “fuck” in a motion picture when I first saw it at the Surf Theater in San Francisco, 1967 or ’68. That really startled me, made me a little nervous.  There were certain scenes I’d remembered, such as Dylan and the guy from Time, Dylan and the science student, Dylan blowing Donovan away with “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” after Donovan had sung a song. But I’d forgotten a lot of the other stuff. Quite a time capsule.

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1/30. ZERO EFFECT at Lincoln Square. Really liked this. First feature written and directed by Lawrence Kasden’s 22 yr. old son Jake. Stars Bill Pullman as the “world’s greatest living detective.” Also Ben Stiller and Ryan O’Neal. Some of the stuff doesn’t work. The convoluted instructions O’Neal is given for delivering the blackmail money are simply not credible; nobody could set it up to work out like that. Some of Pullman’s eccentricities, such as writing and badly performing songs, are more distracting, or just oddball, than anything else. Kim Dickens plays the blackmailer Pullman falls in love with. Not aware of seeing her before, but I liked her (especially liked her later in the HBO series Deadwood and Treme). Angie Featherstone, who seems to be turning up everywhere, has a nothing role as Stiller’s girlfriend. Weird to remember seeing her around the Upper West Side.

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2/5. PHANTOM LADY (Robert Siodmak) and BLACK ANGEL (Roy William Neill) at Film Forum. Two film noirs I hadn’t seen, or thought I hadn’t, though started to feel like I had seen BLACK ANGEL when the scene shifted to Lorre’s nightclub. Anyway, both are pretty good, if unexceptional, examples of ’40s noir. Similar situations of someone who’s innocent convicted to death for a murder he didn’t commit, and the efforts of others to prove the person’s innocence before he’s executed. PHANTOM LADY is probably the better of the two, though I really like Dan Dureya in BLACK ANGEL.

Elisha Cook’s frenzied drum solo in the jazz club in Phantom Lady really jacks the energy level. Here’s the scene.

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2/7. FOUR DAYS IN SEPTEMBER at Lincoln Plaza. Brazilian film directed by Bruno Barreto. Not sure what else this guy has made, though the name seems familiar. I basically liked this, particularly the relatively low-key tone, though got to admit I wanted something a little “bigger” at the end. I don’t remember when these events happened; of course, I was in Thailand at the time and out of it, so it’s no surprise. And there were a lot of things like this going on during the late 60s and into the 70s. Alan Arkin plays an American Ambassador in Rio who’s kidnapped by a militant group protesting the military dictatorship then in power. Interesting to see Caroline Kava playing his wife. And Fisher Stevens with about two minutes of screen time and three or four lines of dialogue. Wonder what happened there? The film’s focus is on the kidnappers, a group of student-types kind of out of their depth, except for two older men who come in to run the kidnapping. The most character development is with one intellectual guy, a writer and speaker, who’s a bit clumsy with guns etc. Turns out this guy wrote the book the movie is based on, so makes sense he gets more attention. Some scenes with a member of the secret police don’t work as well. Would’ve needed more development. Also, some of the movie seems a little underproduced, but it’s pretty effective for the most part. There’s a sort of DAY OF THE JACKAL approach that clashes a bit with the more political aspects. Arkin is very good.

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2/13. SPHERE at Lincoln Square. Just awful. Can’t see how it could be any worse. Completely incoherent and half-baked from top to bottom. How could a “serious” actor like Dustin Hoffman have gotten into this; what could he have seen at the outset that made him feel like this was something worth doing? Maybe the paycheck was enough. I was pretty staggered by how inept the whole thing was.

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2/14. MA VIE EN ROSE at Lincoln Plaza. Liked this a lot. It’s been around since Christmas, but have put off seeing it. The actor who plays the 7 year old boy with the gender issue is quite a presence. Found myself attracted to the character as a girl rather than as a boy. Interesting. The parents are really great characters. There’s a scene I particularly liked when Ludovic, the boy, goes outside to find his father, who’s stormed off in anger, but has calmed down a bit now, and Ludovic silently takes his father’s hand and they walk together back inside. Totally wordless scene, very powerful and emotional, it touched something in me.

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2/22. SHOCK CORRIDOR at Film Forum. This Samuel Fuller film seemed very disappointing to me today. Have seen it before and remember liking it more then. Most of his movies are pretty overheated, but this one is just too hysterical. Some pretty good moments, but some irritating ones too. Overall I think it makes a better premise than it does a movie, or at least the one he made. I much prefer NAKED KISS and the war films. Still, Fuller wasn’t afraid to take things to extremes, which I like.

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2/23. PALMETTO at Loew’s 84th Street. Pretty bad. Doesn’t do much with the rather over-done neo-noir femme fatale fucks over not-too-smart guy premise. Elizabeth Shue, Chloë Sevigny, and Gina Gerson are good here, but the movie just doesn’t fly. By the time Woody Harrelson is recruited to be the DA department’s press liaison, it’s all pretty much out the window. Volker Schlondorff has done much, much better.

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2/28. DARK CITY at Loew’s 84th. Kind of evaporates after seeing it, but I liked it. Very striking stuff. Reminiscent of the BRAZIL landscape in a way. Rufus Sewell was good as the protagonist. Has a very comic book look, like some European comics I’ve seen, also Mr. X and the Radiant City scene. Impresses with images more than logic. I thought there would be more twists and turns, though. The bits and pieces of explanations we get along the way are never revealed to be something else, so it’s pretty straight forward about what’s “really” going on.

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3/6. TWILIGHT at multiplex in Burbank, California. Not very good. Too bad, because this has a lot of good people involved; Newman, Hackman, Sarandon, James Garner, Robert Benton. Was kind of shocked at how old Newman looks. Doesn’t even sound like himself much of the time. The noir story isn’t very interesting, so we’re really left with the characters and the mood, which don’t deliver as strongly as they should. Elmer Bernstein’s score is pretty good. It’s just that this has been done much better. Occurs to me that it lacks energy. Everybody seems so tired and the film feels tired. But I wanted to like it.

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3/7. THE BIG LEBOWSKI at multiplex in Burbank. Well, it’s no FARGO, that’s for sure. Didn’t think it was very good while watching it, but not so sure now. From some other filmmakers I’d probably say it’s a mess, but with the Coens I’m not sure. I think the messiness is a deliberate part of the style, but the movie seems so scattershot. Jeff Bridges is good. By the end, he & John Goodman have become a kind of Laurel & Hardy. But what the hell is David Thewlis doing here, what’s the point? Liked Julianne Moore, though she was one in a series of very off the wall characters. Bridges’ character was the one most grounded in “reality,” with the most recognizable reactions to what’s going on around him. There’s an overload of funny stuff and bizarreness, but it doesn’t add up.

Subsequent viewings showed me how off the mark my initial reaction was. I think I was hoping for another Fargo, but expectations often lead to disappointment. I love it now. John Goodman’s frequent eruptions are especially great.

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4/10. LITTLE DIETER NEEDS TO FLY at Film Forum. Good Werner Herzog documentary about German-born Dieter Dengler who saw his first airplanes when Allied fighters strafed his village during WWII. Became a Navy pilot who got shot down on his first mission over Vietnam, spent 6 months as a POW, then made a miraculous escape. Amazing story. Dengler tells most of it to the camera, with Herzog coming in occasionally on narration. I really liked Dengler.

In 2006, Herzog made a narrative feature film, Rescue Dawn, based on these events, with Christian Bale as Dieter Dengler.

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4/11. CITY OF ANGELS at Sony Lincoln Square. Okay remake of Wim Wenders’ great WINGS OF DESIRE. Nicolas Cage & Meg Ryan give good performances. Dennis Franz is also very good. The ending is fucked.

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4/24. AFFLICTION at  Avignon/NY Film Fest. Just great. Paul Schrader’s adaptation of Russell Banks’ novel. Nick Nolte and James Coburn give awesome performances. As much as anything else it’s about the violence and dysfunction of a father passed down to his son. Mounting sense of impending doom; you know this isn’t going to turn out happy. The music is low-key, creates a disturbing, uneasy feeling. Sissy Spacek is very good as Nolte’s girlfriend. Willem Dafoe seems a little wasted as Nolte’s brother, the one who got away, surviving his father’s violence by becoming “careful” (as his character puts it) and ultimately ineffectual, I think. Actually, it’s not that he’s wasted; he just doesn’t have much screen time, though he does narrate the film (beginning, end, several places in between). This movie seem to be right in every detail.

James Coburn is especially great in this. Check this scene for proof of that.

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6/20. THE X-FILES at the Ziegfeld. Since this was playing at the Ziegfeld, I made the extra effort to see it there, even though I don’t like their new reserved seat policy. Got there at 10am with idea of getting ticket for later in the day, or maybe for right then. Decided to to go for the 10am show, then was pleased to find out they weren’t doing the reserved seat deal for the morning show, so where I sat was totally my choice. Liked the movie. It was like a big episode, which is pretty much what I expected. Didn’t think some of John Neville’s “explanation” dialogue played very well, but what the hell. Will be curious to see how successful the movie is for people who don’t follow the TV series. I wish Mitch Pileggi had had more to do. The short, sudden appearance of the Lone Gunmen will be meaningless to people who haven’t seen them on the show. It wasn’t great, didn’t transcend itself, but  wasn’t a disappointment by a long shot. The explosion at the building in Dallas and Mulder & Scully trying to outrun the snow-covered ground caving in in Antarctica were amazing sequences.

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7/2. ARMAGEDDON at Loews 84th Street. Pretty bad. Actually, very bad. Makes DEEP IMPACT seem like something out of Chekhov.

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7/11. BUFFALO 66 at Lincoln Plaza. Excruciating, irritating in the extreme, very difficult to watch, thought of walking out several times. Christina Ricci is good, but I really didn’t like this movie. Didn’t believe one minute of it. Based on this, Vincent Gallo has no talent for making movies, other than to act in other people’s. Ben Gazzara’s and Anjelica Huston’s performances are just awful, which I blame on the direction and the script, since they’re both otherwise terrific actors.

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7/25. SAVING PRIVATE RYAN at Sony Lincoln Square. Great. The combat sequences are amazing, intense and frightening. A sense of being on the brink of death is strongly conveyed.  There’s a kind of calvary-to-the-rescue aspect to the fighter planes hitting the village just as the Germans are about to take the bridge, but so what. Plus I kind of wish the grown up Ryan hadn’t saluted Hanks’ grave marker at the end. But the whole thing is such an overwhelming experience, these are small objections.

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8/15. GADJO DILO at Lincoln Plaza. Boy, this was great! Third in a gypsy trilogy directed by Tony Gatlif. First one was LATCHO DROM, which I’ve heard of, but not seen. I was really with this up to the point when Adriani, Izador’s son, returns from prison, after which the movie takes a turn I don’t quite get, or like. Seems like all of a sudden there’s this whole other thing going on, and I don’t know how it fits in. Maybe I missed something. When Adriani kills the guy in the bar, then is chased back to his village and burned to death, I don’t know what to make of it. Also don’t know why Stephane smashes and buries the music cassette tapes & notes he’s made of gypsy music during the movie . But at least Sabina is with him in the car. Rona Hartner, the actress who plays Sabina is amazing, or at least the character is amazing. Very very sexual presence in a kind of animal way, very sensual way. The sequence when they go to a nightclub in Bucharest is just wonderful.

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9/25. CELEBRITY at NYFF. Opening night of the New York Film Festival, new Woody Allen movie. Thought it was terrible, except Leonardo DiCaprio and Charlize Theron, who were great. Kenneth Branagh plays the Woody Allen character and does an imitation of Allen’s vocal & physical mannerisms that’s really irritating. Just doesn’t work. Nothing in the movie seems to come together at all. This is an inexplicable misfire. He shot it in black & white for no apparent reason I can think of. Oddly enough, the lab credit at the end lists “Color by Du Art.” Strange. Judy Davis is pretty good, also Joe Mantegna, but Branagh is seriously miscast, given the way his character is written and directed.

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11/28. CITIZEN KANE at UA 14. Nice to see this in a new theater. Pretty good print, too. The ending always gets me, the sled burning in the flames with Hermann’s music swelling up. Like the door closing on John Wayne at the end of THE SEARCHERS.

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12/24. THE THIN RED LINE at Ziegfeld. Great, weird, abstract, sad, intense. Not sure quite what to make of it. There’s almost no real story, very little characterization, more mood than plot, but it’s nevertheless very compelling.

I love this film. After multiple viewings over the years, I’m still not quite sure what to make of it. What I am sure of is that it’s some kind of great film that’s had its hooks in me all this time. It has an ethereal quality, and seems to take place in a space apart from the physical world. Feels like you’re in the presence of something you can’t pin down.

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Going over this list I’m struck by how many of these films you don’t hear about, or even remember, such as Zero Effect, Four Days in September, Sphere, City of Angels, Buffalo 66, and Celebrity. I mean, Palmetto? They aren’t revived or written about, mostly for obvious reasons, but not always.

There are other films I saw in 1998 that I didn’t write about, but wish I had. These include The Spanish Prisoner (David Mamet, director & writer), The Butcher Boy (Neil Jordan, director & co-writer), Ronin (John Frankenheimer, director), My Name Is Joe (Ken Loach, director), Rushmore (Wes Anderson, director & co-writer), and The Siege (Edward Zwick, director & co-writer). These are good films, but you’d have to go looking for them, because as far as I know, they don’t get revived or talked about. Maybe someday.

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Okay, that does it for this one. See you next time. — Ted Hicks

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