The Screengrab : heaven's gate

Up The Academy: Screengrab Salutes The All-Time Best & Worst Best Picture Winners (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 21:00:00 GMT

Forget Christmas: for movie geeks, the period from New Year’s Eve to the third week in February is truly the most wonderful time of the year, from the endless Best of Lists and Golden Globes straight through the Saggies and Spirit Awards to the reddest carpet of all...Mama Oscar.

As per recently made-up tradition, the Screengrab will be live-blogging the Academy Awards this coming Sunday...and while we’re on the subject, can we please call a moratorium on bitching about the length of the show? Do sports fans cry every year about the length of the Super Bowl? Do they squeeze all the punt returns into a 65-second medley to streamline the running time? NO! If you’re a sports fan, you want the Super Bowl to last all day. And if you’re NOT a sports fan, then why the hell are you even watching? Just check out the highlights on the news and leave the rest of us in peace, ferchrissakes!

Sorry...just had to vent. And, if you think about it, strong opinions about trivial nonsense is pretty much the lifeblood of Oscar season. Arguments about who deserved to win and who got robbed have livened up the annual ceremony ever since Sunrise totally stole Best Unique and Artistic Production from Chang in 1928.

Sadly, our recent calls to reinstate the Best Unique and Artistic Production category have fallen on deaf ears (sorry, Synechdoche, New York), but there’s plenty more Oscar opining ahead as we here at the Screengrab salute (and condemn) THE BEST (AND WORST) BEST PICTURES OF ALL TIME!

THE BEST:

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (2007)

This wasn't supposed to happen. While they might win the occasional token screenplay award (as they did for Fargo), the Coen Brothers were never going to be respectable and mainstream enough to take home the top Oscar honors. Perhaps emboldened by their belated coronation of Martin Scorsese, however, the Academy saw fit to award this dark, ultra-violent neo-noir with the coveted Best Picture prize. Maybe the literary pedigree helped – after all, even Oprah had given her seal of approval to Cormac McCarthy, author of the novel No Country for Old Men. The film is certainly the most faithful adaptation of the book imaginable, and yet it couldn't be anything other than a Coen Brothers movie. Much of McCarthy's story unfolds through the sort of sardonic, deadpan dialogue that's always been right in the Coens' wheelhouse, and the more action-oriented scenes are rendered with such an uncanny grasp of McCarthy's evocative and precise geography, readers of the book may experience severe déjà vu. Javier Bardem, himself an Oscar winner for Best Supporting Actor, is a uniquely malevolent presence as the killing machine Chigurh. While there are several suspense sequences destined for the Coens greatest hits reel (notably an attack dog's pursuit of Josh Brolin's doomed Marlboro Man into the Rio Grande, and a deadly game of 'musical rooms' at a rundown motel), in its final lyrical moments, No Country for Old Men transcends genre and lays waste to any notion of the Coens as the sniggering egghead pranksters of cinema.

THE LAST EMPEROR (1987)

In truth, The Last Emperor is kind of a silly movie: its take on China's 20th century political landscape is kind of vacuous and unenlightening, and it centers around an appropriately blank protagonist played by a totally undistinguished actor who seems to have been cast only because his last name, almost too conveniently, was "Lone." But it's also an apex of Bernardo Bertolucci's unhinged formalism (or, more accurately, of Vittorio Storaro's insane but effective color schemes), and as a lush, consistently gorgeous aesthetic exercise, it's pretty untoppable. If the Academy wanted pretty and inoffensively political, at least they got one out of two.

THE DEER HUNTER (1978)

Michael Cimino’s reputation was so tarnished by the epic financial and critical failure of 1980’s (unjustly vilified) Heaven’s Gate that it’s almost impossible to watch his preceding film, 1978’s The Deer Hunter, without thinking about the once-promising director’s impending fall from grace. Purely on its own merits, however, Cimino’s Best Picture winner holds up remarkably well as a marriage of New Hollywood authenticity and Old Hollywood scope, and as a portrait of not only the Vietnam War’s toll on those who fought it, but of war’s careless misuse of human life, the latter point epitomized by the iconic Russian Roulette finale involving Christopher Walken’s battle-scarred vet. Shot by Vilmos Zsigmond with a haunting, melancholic loveliness that’s at odds with much of the material’s harrowing grimness, Cimino’s film (partially indebted to the work of Visconti) plays like a messy, sprawling novel, intimately evoking its characters’ Russian heritage and Pennsylvania steel town roots, poignantly utilizing rituals and ceremonies to express their bonds of love and friendship, and ably casting its tale as emblematic of America’s post-Vietnam moral and emotional disarray.

OLIVER! (1968)

This adaptation of Lionel Bart's stage musical version of Oliver Twist is one of those Oscar winners that isn't especially well-remembered these days and may be regarded as a fluky choice at best, which is unfair. It represents a late show of mastery by the great British director Carol Reed, who had suffered through a lousy decade since his last successful production, the 1959 Our Man in Havana. Working with a first-rate cast that includes Ron Moody as Fagin, Shani Wallis as Nancy, and non-singing (thank God) Oliver Reed as Bill Sikes, Carol Reed managed to use the rather undistinguished musical as a way to create a stylized version of the Dickens story, utilizing the energy and wit of the performers and his own cinematic brio to compensate for the limitations of Bart's songs. The movie also has its place in history for marking the last moment when Hollywood felt comfortable declaring that an all-ages movie was the best of the year; the next year, the Best Picture award would go to the adults-only Midnight Cowboy.

THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI (1957)

There’s a case to be made that David Lean’s early, more modestly sized efforts were superior to his later epics, though if the legendary auteur ultimately sacrificed emotional and dramatic tautness in favor of marathon distension, it occurred at some point after 1957’s The Bridge on the River Kwai, a peerless example of larger-than-life filmmaking. As the British military commander who, in a Japanese POW camp during WWII, spearheads the construction of a bridge that his British compatriots plan on destroying, Alec Guinness brilliantly personifies the destructive folly of pride. His army officer, determined to complete the bridge as a means of proving British cultural/political supremacy, is opposed by Sessue Hayakawa’s Japanese colonel, driven to break his Western prisoners’ spirits and terrified that the British will humiliate his own men (and nation) by successfully completing their bridge-building task. Their one-on-one conflict is enlivened, rather than dwarfed, by Lean’s grand direction, culminating in a finale that’s memorable not just for its scale, but for the unforgettable look of sudden awareness, and regret, on Guinness’ face.

Click Here For Part Two, Three, Four, Five, Six & Seven

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Vadim Rizov, Nick Schager, Phil Nugent

Set Your DVR! December 29, 2008 - January 5, 2009

Hayden Childs — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Ugh. The post-Xmas blues are coming on strong. Hell, let's drink to baby new year 2009 and get it over with! Here's the DVR-worthy scoop for the coming week. Times are Central/Eastern and overnight movies go with the previous day.

Monday, December 29:

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is all wacky postmodernism, while The Sweet Hereafter is quite the opposite. The Player is somewhere in-between, but a lot funnier.

1:30/2:30 pm: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead on IFC.
9/10 pm: The Sweet Hereafter on IFC.
11 pm/12 am: The Player on IFC.
3:05/4:05 am: The Sweet Hereafter on IFC.

Tuesday, December 30:

The penultimate day of 2008 is all about the past and the future! Ang Lee's Ride With The Devil is a topsy-turvy Civil War film, while Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch is not just the greatest Western, but the greatest film that this country has ever produced. CQ is about a lost young screenwriter in swinging Europe during the 60s making a Barbarella-like retro-future flick. Soylent Green is, uh, people. Heaven's Gate is an amazing, dull something.

4:30/5:30 pm: Ride With the Devil on AMC.
7/8 pm: The Wild Bunch on AMC.
7:30/8:30 pm: CQ on IFC.
9/10 pm: Soylent Green on TCM.
1/2 am: Heaven’s Gate on TCM.

Wednesday, December 31:

It's the last day of the year, spend the sober part of it with America's (fictionalized) history. Stagecoach, the film that Orson Welles studied to learn how to direct movies, is surprisingly claustrophobic, given that it was shot in Monument Valley, and one of the most influential films ever made. And of course you've seen the two Sergio Leone movies before, but there's never a bad reason to watch one of the Man With No Name films.

5/6 am: Stagecoach on TCM.
9/10 am: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly on AMC.
1/2 pm: A Fistful of Dollars on AMC.

Thursday, January 1:

If you find yourself up early (or late), The Coen Brother's gangster film Miller's Crossing is the best movie they've made. TCM has a Cary Grant film festival running during the day, with the screwball classics Bringing Up Baby, The Awful Truth, and It Happened One Night (there's others, too, but these are the best). In prime time, TCM is running the original King Kong, which is an awe-inspiring movie. And Reservoir Dogs is, of course, the movie that launched Madonna's career.

8:15/9:15 am: Miller’s Crossing on IFC.
10/11 am: Bringing Up Baby on TCM.
2:30/3:30 pm: Miller’s Crossing on IFC.
3:15/4:15 pm: The Awful Truth on TCM.
5/6 pm: It Happened One Night on TCM.
7/8 pm: King Kong (1933) on TCM.
9:15/10:15 pm: Reservoir Dogs on IFC.
2:35/3:35 am: Reservoir Dogs on IFC.

Friday, January 2:

While IFC has the weirdness of Blue Velvet, TCM is running a Randolph Scott film festival. The first two were directed by Budd Boetticher and are great, sometimes dark, versions of the classic Western style. I don't know anything about The Cariboo Trail. Western Union was directed by Fritz Lang. Excuse me, I mean Fritz "Kick Ass" Lang.

6:25/7:25 pm: Blue Velvet on IFC.
7/8 pm: The Tall T on TCM.
8:30/9:30 pm: Ride Lonesome on TCM.
10/11 pm: The Cariboo Trail on TCM.
11:30 pm/12:30 am: Western Union on TCM.
2:15/3:15 am: Blue Velvet on IFC.

Saturday, January 3:

Saturday doesn't have much. The 47 Ronin is the first part of an epic samurai tale. I'm guessing the second half will run the following Saturday. And Modern Times is the classic Chaplin film.

7/8 am: The 47 Ronin, Part I on IFC.
7/8 pm: Modern Times on TCM.

Sunday, January 4:

Burden of Dreams is the documentary about the ambitious dreamer Werner Herzog slowly going insane while trying to film Fitzcarraldo, a movie about an ambitious dreamer who slowly goes insane. Harlan County, USA is a documentary about a mining strike in Kentucky in the 70s. After watching this movie, you may join the IWW. And Paranoid Park is Gus Van Sant's 2008 film about skateboarders and murder. It's in the vein of his Death Trilogy rather than his more conventional style, and it's topping many Best Of 2008 lists.

7/8 am: Burden of Dreams on IFC.
8:45/9:45 am Harlan County, USA on IFC.
12:05/1:05 pm: Burden of Dreams on IFC.
5:30/6:30 pm: Paranoid Park on IFC.

Monday, January 5:

Back to the grindstone again! In this case, the grindstone will be played by Andrei Tarkovsky's experimental film Solaris and Michael Winterbottom's trippy history of Tony Wilson and the Manchester scene, 24 Hour Party People.

1:35/2:35 pm: Solaris on IFC.
4:30/5:30 pm: 24 Hour Party People on IFC.

Unwatchable: The All-Time Bottom 100 Movies

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 17:30:00 GMT

Forget Ishtar, Heaven’s Gate, Howard the Duck and all the other renowned turkeys of cinema history. The Guardian delves into the depths of the IMDb’s 100 lowest ranked movies to find the truly toxic, the absolute worst of the worst. As Sam Richards writes, the IMDb list “differs from most critic-voted ‘worst movie of all-time’ lists, in that any film that's memorably bad - say, Swept Away - tends to get just enough positive responses to save it from total ignominy. The Bottom 100 exists to catalogue films that have been viewed out of error, obligation or last-turkey-in-the-shop desperation.”

Richards sampled a handful of the lowest-ranked entries “in a Ludovico technique-style experiment.” Number three on the list is Zombie Nation, “a staggeringly idiotic 2004 film by German director Ulli Lommel, regarded as a modern day Ed Wood…Expecting a gore-fest, you're confronted by the world's worst 'zombies': they wear aviators and lipstick, drive cars and devour their prey to the sound of perky Europop.” He also checks out Mystery Science Theater 3000 favorite Manos: The Hands of Fate, “shabby piece of teensploitation” Invisible Maniac, and the number one entry on the Bottom 100, none other than The Hottie and the Nottie. “It's not the worst film ever though, just a predictable, insulting vanity project that asks you to accept that an emu-faced posho with only one available facial expression is the most beautiful woman in America.”

You can check out the complete list here. As you can see, it skews toward more recent fare like Witless Protection and the critically reviled oeuvre of spoofmeisters Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer (Meet the Spartans). Somebody must like those movies since they keep making money, but apparently the fans prefer to remain incognito. Our biggest disappointment is that Richards did not subject himself to #82 on the list, Anus Magillicutty. An IMDb user comment reveals one of the pitfalls of the Bottom 100: “I watched this movie because it was rated to be so bad it might have been good.” If there’s one thing we’ve learned here at the Screengrab, it’s that this is almost never true.

Rep Report Addendum: 90 Years' Worth of United Artists at Film Forum

Phil Nugent — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 20:00:00 GMT

United Artists may have been the first major American film studio to be set up, back in 1919, in some kind of spirit of. . . if not utopianism, then at least something other than outright hostile opposition to the people on the creative end. It was the people on the creative end who set it up — four of them, to be precise — D. W. Griffith, Charles Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., and Mary Pickford — with an eye towards distributing their own movies, and accounts of its founding that sought out the opinion of their rival studio heads tended to be long of images of asylums taken over by the inmates, that sort of thing. Originally each member of the original triumvirate was supposed to help the studio make its nut by turning out four films a year, which might not have been such a crackpot idea at one point, but Griffith and Chaplin and Fairbanks were beginning to think bigger and bigger on projects that they fussed over for longer and longer periods, and none of them were getting any younger, and it wasn't long before other filmmakers were being invited to make films for UA. In the 1950s, producers Arthur Krim and Robert Benjamin took it over, with Chaplin and Pickford's blessings. (Fairbanks and Griffith had died by then.) As Dave Kehr notes, "Because United Artists did not feel constrained by the moral strictures of the Production Code, it was able to move quickly as social mores changed in the 1960s." In the fifties, working with a succession of independent producers, the studio had greenlit movies that defied censorship codes and conventional attitudes such as The Manchurian Candidate, Sweet Smell of Success, and Kiss Me Deadly. In the 1960s, they produced Midnight Cowboy, the first movie to win the Academy Award for Best Picture after having been given an X rating by the MPAA. (They also developed a lucrative sideline in English-speaking imports, such as the British films Tom Jones — another Oscar winner for Best Picture — A Hard Day's Night, and Sunday, Bloody Sunday, as well as the dubbed versions of Sergio Leone's Italian Westerns starring Clint Eastwood.

In the 1970s, UA's faith in risk-taking filmmakers made possible such Renaissance-era classics as Last Tango in Paris, Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye and Thieves Like Us, and Annie Hall, but this approach, led them grief: at a precarious time in the company's fortune, around the time that Krim, Benjamin, and CEO Eric Pleskow noisily broke away to form their own company, Orion, Michael Cimino showed up at UA's door with a script called Heaven's Gate and a request for enough rope, and the confused, inexperienced new UA bosses gave him enough to hang half the directors in Los Angeles. Cimino's baby, which premiered in the same season that produced the studio's last proud moment, Raging Bull, sank United Artists, which wound up being picked up by MGM, which coveted its distribution apparatus. For much of the time since then, UA has amounted to a handful of franchise rights (mainly to the Pink Panther and James Bond) in search of a studio, but last year it became a play toy for Tom Cruise and his producing partner Paula Wagner. Starting today and running through May 1, Film Forum honors the good old days with a mammoth retrospective that includes all the films listed above — well, except for Heaven's Gate; I mean, would you invite the guy who killed your kids to your wedding anniversary? — including other delights, including key films by the original big four: Griffith's Orphans of the Storm, Way Down East, and Broken Blossoms; Chaplin's City Lights and Modern Times; Fairbanks's The Thief of Bagdad, The Mask of Zorro, and Robin Hood; and Mary Pickford's Sparrows and My Best Girl.

Joe Queenan: The Worst Movies Ever Made Aren't What They Used to Be

Phil Nugent — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Professional cranky bastard Joe Queenan surveys the current contenders for the title of worst movie ever made and finds them lacking. He is appalled that a walking answer to a trivia-quiz lightning round like Paris Hilton can take a few weeks off from doing nothing to doing nothing in front of a camera crew, and that the results can be used to scare people away from theaters for a weekend or two in the late winter season, and this gets called the worst movie ever made, as if enough work had gone into it for it to qualify as a movie, let alone the worst anything. "That is not fair," he grrumbles. "It is not fair to Kevin Costner, it is not fair to Jennifer Lopez, and it is certainly not fair to Madonna. Though it is a natural impulse to believe that the excruciating film one is watching today is on a par with the excruciating films of yesterday, this is a slight to those who have worked long and hard to make movies so moronic that the public will still be talking about them decades later. Anyone can make a bad movie; Kate Hudson and Adam Sandler make them by the fistful." Queenan saves his lowest accolades for movies that are shown real misguided imagination and daring in their very conception. As examples, he cites Futz!, a 1969 hippie extravaganza based on an Off-Broadway play, written in verse, about a farmer whose very close relationship with his pig meets with the disapproval of his neighbors. Though made by the same people who worked on the theatrical production, the fil adaptation trumped the live version because they were able to use a real pig, causing many reviewers to remark that seeing the movie put the viewer in the unusual position of seeing a blameless pig robbed of its dignity. (I have never seen Futz! myself, and not for lack of trying. I sometimes wonder if there is a single remaining print out there somewhere, and if so, if cast member Sally Kirkland might not be hiding it under her bed.)

Queenan also cites Pier Paolo Pasolini's final film, Salo, "the lighthearted Holocaust-era comedy Life Is Beautiful", and The Way We Were, which differs from those pictures in that it doesn't have any Nazis in it, though I'm not sure I'd argue that it doesn't belong. In the end, though, he takes the practical-minded position that a real contender has to have practical consequences: he's looking for "a movie that destroys a studio, wrecks careers, bankrupts investors, and turns everyone connected with it into a laughing stock..." Yes, he's giving the title to old-school favorite Heaven's Gate, the one that took down United Artists. "This is a movie about Harvard-educated gunslingers who face off against eastern European sodbusters in an epic struggle for the soul of America. This is a movie that stars Isabelle Huppert as a shotgun-toting cowgirl. This is a movie in which Jeff Bridges pukes while mounted on roller skates. This is a movie that has five minutes of uninterrupted fiddle-playing by a fiddler who is also mounted on roller skates." I'm pretty sure that the "mounted on roller skates" theme is one that even Futz! let slip through its fingers, but again, I haven't seen it and can only guess. Queenan reports that he knew someone who worked for the public relations company that handled the picture: "He told me that when the 220-minute extravaganza debuted at the Toronto film festival, the reaction was so thermonuclear that the stars and the film-maker had to immediately be flown back to Hollywood, perhaps out of fear for their lives. No one at the studio wanted to go out and greet them upon their return; no one wanted to be seen in that particular hearse. My friend eventually agreed to man the limo that would meet the children of the damned on the airport tarmac and whisk them to safety, but only provided he was given free use of the vehicle for the next three days. After he dropped off the halt and the lame at suitable safe houses and hiding places, he went to Mexico for the weekend." Of course, that was then and this is now, and while it seems unlikely that it'll ever start smoking The Godfather in the AFI polls, Heaven's Gate now has a hardy band of deeply committed, easily riled defenders, every one of whom I know in my heart is a superior person who dresses better than I do. That, too, is part of the charm of a true worst movie--enough vision, talent, and passion should have gone into it that someone will see grounds for its defense in there. I do no forsee a day in which there will be a ravening cult sticking up for The Hottie and the Nottie, but if that does ever happen, I'd keep an eye out for the other three horsemen.

Vanishing Act: Michael Cimino

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 17:30:00 GMT

When contemplating a subject for the “Vanishing Act” column, I often find myself wondering, “Why hasn’t this person worked in so long?” In the case of Michael Cimino, I did not ask this question. My query was more along the lines of, “How many incriminating photos of which top Hollywood executive blowing what particular kind of farm animal did this person have in order to keep working for so long after Heaven’s Gate?”

Indeed, Gate is such a storied, monumental flop in the annals of motion picture history, it’s some sort of credit to Cimino that it took him so long to vanish. This is particularly true when you consider a slate of aborted projects that makes Terry Gilliam look prolific and bankable by comparison. For instance, did you know that at one time, Cimino was actually hired to direct Footloose? Personally, I would like to see documentary footage of the meeting at which this decision was reached. I’d much rather see that than ever again sit through Desperate Hours or Year of the Dragon, two Cimino films that actually were made. (Quoth Footloose producer Craig Zadan: “Cimino wanted to make a darker movie. We wanted to make an entertainment.” And Kenny Loggins rejoiced.)

The man has never lacked for ambition. Other Cimino projects that never got off the drawing board include an adaptation of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, biopics of Dostoevsky and Janis Joplin, and a multi-generational American Indian saga to be filmed entirely in the Sioux language. At one time or another, legend has it that he was slated to direct The Dogs of War, The King of Comedy, The Dead Zone and Mutiny on the Bounty. (There’s gotta be a sequel to Final Cut in here somewhere, right?)

Cimino’s final completed feature to date is 1996’s The Sunchaser, starring Woody Harrelson as a wealthy doctor who is kidnapped by a terminally ill gangbanger hoping to find a magical lake of healing. Grossing a grand total of $23,107 at the box office, the barely released Sunchaser appears to have done what Heaven’s Gate could not: make Cimino a complete untouchable.

In 2001, Cimino published his first novel, Big Jane. The following year he gave a rare interview to the Independent, dispelling rumors that he’d had a sex change operation and talking up a big-screen comeback with an adaptation of Man’s Fate, “Andre Malraux's dense, heady novel about the squelched 1927 Communist uprising in Shanghai.” It never happened.

The good news is: they love him in France! Last year, Cimino earned his first film credit in over a decade, contributing the three-minute segment “No Translation Needed” to the omnibus film Chacun son cinema. Don’t call it a comeback yet, but at least it’s a start.

Oprah's Favorite Things Include Watching Road House

Peter Smith — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 18:00:00 GMT

We're not so into this trend of giant DVD box sets; they tend to be padded with lots of half-baked featurettes, useless production stills, and other things you'd never pay money for if they weren't all packaged together in a pretty box with a movie you really like. But United Artists just took it to the next level with its 90th Anniversary Prestige Collection — a massive 110-disc set that features ninety films from seven decades. Oprah just named it one of her Favorite Things, which means it will sell like hotcakes. $870 hotcakes to be exact. But let's look at exactly which ninety movies are featured, shall we?

First off, the box set starts with the '40s, leaving out the opportunity to include earlier United Artist benchmarks like Broken Blossoms (1919), The Gold Rush (1925) and Stagecoach (1939).

The '40s/'50s selection, including Marty, Night of the Hunter and Some Like It Hot, is fairly solid — although Rebecca and The African Queen are among the missing.

The '60s brings a bunch of Bond films and some second-tier Billy Wilder. Good picks: The Apartment, In the Heat of the Night, Satyricon, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, Midnight Cowboy. Questionable: It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, The Thomas Crown Affair, The Battle of Britain, I Could Go On Singing. Notable omission: The Graduate.

The '70s has some interesting stuff: Rocky, Annie Hall, The Last Waltz, Carrie, Manhattan, Last Tango in Paris and Lenny would make for a quality weekend of film-watching. But The Pink Panther Strikes Again? Equus? And how much James Bond do we really need? Missing in action: Network and Being There.

By the '80s, things are getting a bit random. Enjoy a triple feature of Heaven's Gate, WarGames and Child's Play! Or alternately, Baby Boom, Raging Bull and Road House! Top it off with the most unnecessary Bond film of them all, the Timothy Dalton vehicle The Living Daylights. No big omissions here, unless you want to count I'm Gonna Git You Sucka.

Finally we reach the '90s-'00s, a short selection featuring Bowling for Columbine, the little-seen Pieces of April, The Birdcage, Hotel Rwanda, Leaving Las Vegas, and five others. What, no Showgirls?

Overall, the set feels like a stranger's DVD collection: a few classics, a few childhood favorites, a few questionable selections they probably got for $5 at the drugstore. But it doesn't feel like the collection of a movie buff, nor does it have any particular coherence beyond the name of the studio. If an alien landed on Earth and asked me how to quickly amass an American film collection, I might advise him to get this box set. However, if you live on this planet, you can probably find a better use for your $900. Like, for example, buying forty-five copies of Network. — Gwynne Watkins