When the Motion Picture Academy looked at 1997, it gave its Best Picture award to a bloated soap opera called Titanic. These are much better:
1. Oz
Written by Tom Fontana
Directed by Darnell Martin, Nick Gomez, Jean De Segonzac, Leslie Libman, Larry Williams, and Alan Taylor
Power shifts constantly in a penitentiary's ever-evolving social web. In a perfect climax, the whole network explodes, inverting, distorting, and dashing the prison's hierarchies.
2. The Apostle
Written and directed by Robert Duvall
A double rarity: a thoughtful movie about religion and a textured portrait of the South.
3. The Sweet Hereafter
Directed by Atom Egoyan
Written by Egoyan, from a novel by Russell Banks
Death rips a hole in a town. The viewer drifts both through the community and through time, as helpless as the grieving parents of the story.
4. fast, cheap & out of control
Directed by Errol Morris
Studies in spontaneous order.
5. Deconstructing Harry
Written and directed by Woody Allen
The last great Woody Allen movie is a sardonic, self-lacerating remake of Wild Strawberries.
6. Jackie Brown
Directed by Quentin Tarantino
Written by Tarantino, from a novel by Elmore Leonard
All the Tarantino trademarks are on display here: the idiosyncratic structure, the brilliantly selected soundtrack, the rich and funny dialogue. But there's something deeper going on as well, a pulp fable about integration that refuses to preach or to give the audience a reassuring conclusion.
7. The Ice Storm
Directed by Ang Lee
Written by James Schamus, from a novel by Rick Moody
Before this movie, Christina Ricci had starred in a series of fluffy kid flicks, with only a quirky supporting role in the Addams Family films betraying more than a hint that she had something more in her. With this—released the same year as That Darn Cat!—she suddenly established herself as the indie queen of the late '90s.
8. Henry Fool
Written and directed by Hal Hartley
"OK, you got me outnumbered here four to one and you're gonna kill me here tonight and not a soul in this dimly lit world is gonna notice I'm gone. But one of you, one of you, one of you is gonna have his eye torn out. Period....One of you poor, underpaid jerks is gonna have an eye ripped out of its socket. I promise. It's a small thing perhaps, all things considered, but I will succeed, because it's the only thing I have left to do in this world. So why don't you just take a good look at one another one last time, and think it over a few minutes more."
9. Sunday
Directed by Jonathan Nossiter
Written by Nossiter and James Lasdun, from a story by Lasdun
"I guess I'm too old to play a human being."
10. Face/Off
Directed by John Woo
Written by Mike Werb and Michael Colleary
This crazed sci-fi doppelgängerung is John Woo's best American movie, and frankly I like it better than most of his Hong Kong output too.
Honorable mentions:
11. Grosse Pointe Blank (George Armitage)
12. Ulee's Gold (Victor Nuñez)
13. Gattaca (Andrew Niccol)
14. L.A. Confidential (Curtis Hanson)
15. Public Housing (Frederick Wiseman)
16. The Rainbow Man/John 3:16 (Sam Green)
17. The Spanish Prisoner (David Mamet)
18. The Eel (Shohei Imamura)
19. Gummo (Harmony Korine)
20. Absolute Power (Clint Eastwood)
Of the films of 1997 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in Live Flesh, Fireworks, and Jazz '34.
THE ARCHEOLOGY OF LIBERTY: The Mises Institute has posted a ton of old issues of Liberty in pdf form. My writing appeared in Liberty from late '91 through early '97, and I was a staffer there from mid-'93 to the end of '96. So I've got a lot of old articles in that cache.
It's a little disquieting to reread them now. It isn't pleasant to revisit a piece I remembered as being pretty good only to discover that it's amateurish juvenilia. On the brighter side, there's a couple of pieces I remembered as amateurish juvenilia that turn out to be pretty good. And I suppose it's not so bad to learn that I'm a better writer today than I was nearly two decades ago. It would be much worse to discover the reverse.
In the future I might mention some notable Liberty articles, if only to reel off all the things I wish I did differently. But for now I'll just reprint one brief item that I think holds up -- a fake book review that appeared in the May 1995 edition of the mag. The only part that makes me wince is when I mixed up Airplane! and The Naked Gun. I think the error might have been a deliberate joke, but if so, I can't recall what effect I was straining for.
The piece was titled "O.J.'s Rage." For the record, O.J. Simpson really did write (or at least put his name on) a book called I Want to Tell You. I didn't read a word of it.
O.J. Simpson's I Want to Tell You (Little, Brown & Co., 1995, 842 + xxvi pp., $17.00) was a guaranteed bestseller, thanks to the media spectacle surrounding the Simpson trial. It would have been easy for O.J. to churn out yet another quickie celebrity cash-in paperback of no merit. Instead, he has produced a work that recalls the best of Jorge Luis Borges, Flann O'Brien, and (especially) Italo Calvino -- a book that is at once a novel, an autobiography, and a brooding, powerful meditation on what America once was and could yet become. Multilayered, visionary, and thoroughly readable, this volume heralds the arrival of a startling literary genius.
The hero of I Want to Tell You is Tyrone Martin, an African-American athlete who bears a striking resemblance to Simpson himself. But there are important differences. Unlike O.J., Martin is a failure -- a once-promising talent who burned out early, a victim of Demon Gin. When the novel opens in 1989, Martin has been unemployed for five years. He lives in a welfare hotel in Portland, Oregon, where he drinks, smokes, watches TV -- and, in the middle of the night, writes. Martin becomes obsessed with a pretty waitress named Nicole, but finds himself unable to speak with her. Instead, he mails her chapters from his novel-in-progress about a fictional football player named Homer Simpson. As O.J. explains in his brief preface, Homer Simpson is, in all respects except his first name, O.J. himself; indeed, he insists that all of Martin's "novel" is actually true.
Readers hoping to find new revelations about the death of Nicole Simpson will be disappointed; O.J. wisely keeps mum about the case. He does, however, confess to five other murders, as well as a rape and a botched burglary, and hints that he was involved in the World Trade Center bombing of 1993. He also writes extensively about his experiences on the set of Airplane!, the Zucker-Abraham-Zucker film that established him as a movie star. Most of all, he discusses at great length his surprisingly sophisticated social and political philosophy. While some of his ideas are unusual, to say the least (viz., his proposal that America adopt a "tricameral" legislature), others are nothing short of brilliant. Describing himself as "socially liberal but fiscally conservative," Simpson outlines the most workable scheme yet devised for privatizing Social Security, makes an original case for second-trimester abortion rights, and offers a "constructive critique" of NAFTA -- all in witty, sometimes side-splittingly funny prose.
To Martin's horror, Nicole falls in love, not with him, but with Homer Simpson, the character he has invented. Mad with jealousy, he adds more and more disquieting characteristics to his creation. Homer begins to drink heavily. He habitually beats up his many lovers. He has an affair with his girlfriend's adopted Korean daughter. None of this dissuades Nicole from her love, but it does plant within her a seed of hatred for Martin. Finally, in the penultimate chapter, she breaks into the writer's apartment and kills him. This leads to the book's surreal conclusion, which I shall not reveal here; suffice to say that it is perhaps the most penetrating comment on the human condition I ever have read, as well as the most humane.
Bravo!
In other self-promotional news: I did a column for the Reason site last week about the late Dennis Hopper. And the June Reason is now online, so if you're curious to see my squibs about disco and Jello Biafra, dig in.