If I'm being completely honest the one '90s movie I've probably watched more than any other is
Clueless. Granted mostly in bites and pieces - the last time I gave it a full whirl was about two years ago when my roomie had his short-term GF come over - but it's ridiculously quotable and one of the best Austen adaptations ever, in fact possibly the very best screen version of probably the best Austen novel. And while the girls (particularly Silverstone) rightly get the lion's share of the credit Dan Hedaya's Mel is one of the all-time great comic performances. My fave zinger (starts around 0:43 in this collection of highlights):
Very interested to see how the latest
Emma. (with a dot, apparently) compares with the '90s classic. And while I'm at it I'll also stick up for the much-maligned (among the Janeites, at any rate) 1996 version starring Gwyneth Paltrow, which sizzles with wit and bonhomie among the first-rate cast enhanced even further by Rachel Portman's delicious score (which justly won the Oscar against substantial competition):
Before I get to the replies... man not gonna lie I spent the rest of that day grinning at those
Clueless wisecracks ("CliffsNotes"!). Still don't regret adding it to my scant Blu-ray/DVD collection (it sure came in handy when that old GF of my roomie's came over, though I did enjoy it more than those two lovebirds).
Forgot to mention another fine (loose) '90s Austen adaptation, or two (gotta say Janeites' scorn for Ang Lee's
Sense and Sensibility isn't entirely undeserved). Best scene from Patricia Rozema's
Mansfield Park, yet another reminder that the best books don't usually make the best films and slavish faithfulness to the source material works to the latter's detriment:
And an even looser Mansfield, Whit Stillman's
Metropolitan which like the rest of his oeuvre - including
Love & Friendship, his 2016 adaptation of Austen's epistolary novel
Lady Susan - has since grown on me:
I personally didn't like it much either but its a terrific movie and Hubert happens to be one of my favourite actors, so there's that too.
Sandrine Bonnaire also shouldn't go unmentioned, and in fact if you said Huppert, Bonnaire and Juliette Binoche* are the three greatest actresses alive you wouldn't be too far off. (With all due respect Catherine Deneuve is a slight notch below, and I don't say that 'cause I'm not terribly partial to blondes!)
Can't say I'm too surprised by the lack of enthusiasm for
La Cérémonie, but I myself can't think of another '90s film that better illuminates the perpetual state of mistrust and resentment between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat which of course remains a defining issue of our time. Again a comparison with this year's supposed Best Picture
Parasite is instructive (starting with the fact that both films were partly inspired by the infamous Papin murder case). I don't think it unfair to say the haughty Park patriarch serves as little more than an archetype, one we normally attribute to the rich almost out of spite, and while Choi is not as callous or patronizing she's in the end another prop in the story, the naivete of the carefree upper class personified in a stereotypical trophy wife who looks almost a decade younger than her husband (IRL the actors, Lee Sun-kyun and Cho Yeo-jeong, are only five years apart).
Chabrol's bourgeois characters are much more ambivalent. In fact he sympathizes as much with them if not more so despite devoting more time to the working-class antiheroines - a true rarity for him - and the Lelièvre family's class condescension towards Sophie is largely inadvertent. (The troublemaker Jeanne, of course, is another matter.) In fact Chabrol is careful not to reveal Sophie's illiteracy to us and then to the Lelièvres until after she has settled into her new job, which makes the horrific chain reaction and aftermath all the more shocking, whereas you know a final reckoning is coming when Kim Ki-taek overhears Park casually and contemptuously mentioning to his wife how his sometimes prying chauffeur smells. (Granted I did know about the Papin case before seeing Parasite, but not of Bong's claiming it as an inspiration and I don't think my impression with Chabrol's film would've changed all that much even if I saw it for the first time under similar circumstances.)
That's the difference between a talented film geek and a master auteur. Parasite may be the superior crowd-pleaser and I doubt The Ceremony would've done a whole lot better at the box office even with its successor's marketing team behind it, but that's because the latter asks more of the audience while also giving more to those who are willing to venture beyond the sloganeering (fat chance in this age of authoritarian populism vs. anti-establishment socialism, I know). So yes, a difficult film, but one that has more to say about our present world than nearly all other films of recent vintage.
*Incidentally the only disappointing performance I've ever seen from Binoche was in Ivo van Hove's theatrical production of
Antigone which I saw at the Kennedy Center several years ago. The whole thing was a dud, from van Hove's risible attempts to "update" the timeless Sophocles play - the production fades out to the droning coda of the
Velvet Underground's "Heroin" while the remaining cast sits at the peripheries going about their quotidian existence, just to give you an idea - to Patrick O’Krane's near self-parody as Creon whose impish accent and gleeful villainy wouldn't be out of place in an SNL sketch.
For me it has always been Sunset over Sunrise
The last scene was probably one of the best scenes.
Sunrise definitely has the better ending, arguably as good as Sunset's listening-booth scene:
I still lean towards the latter partly because I don't care much for Nina Simone (who I feel was always hampered by her classical training as she never had that full swing a la her great peers, which FWIW is the same reason why I'm generally underwhelmed by Bill Evans), whereas Kath Bloom's "Come Here" remains one of my most pleasurable discoveries ever.
That said it's really a toss-up between the two classics, probably pointless to even compare as each has its own strengths. But tell you what, when I search "before sunrise" on YouTube and scroll down the first few results I see at least three separate postings of that snapshot of budding love (used to be four before my bookmarked video was taken down), while "before sunset" returns only one for the exquisitely bittersweet conclusion. In fact one of those three videos also shows up in the latter search! May or may not say much about the audience's overall response to both scenes and films, but guess which take I prefer.
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