Outside the Frame...Top Films: 1990

Phenomenal examination of identity - do you pretend to be someone else in order to play yourself? Up close & personal; obliterates divide between documentary and fiction. Mysteriously provoking, sits firmly beside Antonioni or Kieslowski. A masterwork.

Smoldering ambiguity. Dark & hot with a desperate hunger, yet nobly resigned - like a banished prince composing his own elegy. The best adaptation of Jim Thompson (includes the oily Bruce Dern).

A comprehensive look into the inner mechanics of the working "stiffs" as opposed to the glamorous "Godfathers" - impeccably detailed; insightful, free flowing narrative matches the fluid camera movement...and yes, you are funny too.

Pure Kaurismaki. Utilizes classic film noir standards almost as props, turning them into the most original idea involving a hit man - throw in Jean-Pierre Léaud and it's a must!

Are objects of desire the art of deceit? Rohmeresque penmanship dipped in acid: a dish best served in print. Fabrice Luchini...should I say more?

Offers a solution anticipating the question, "Where do love stories go once the passion's gone?" - perversely sexy, provocatively bittersweet.

Bold & depraved...a monster's ball! Impulses so lewd it makes black humor blush. No more troubling than the standard-violent-gore ingredient in commercial products, just a different aesthetic; more akin to black art: where perversion's deepest compulsion taunts consequence.

Takes its cue from 40's Hollywood noir, framed in gorgeous black & white photography. Strangely hypnotic - combined with moody music and clever narrative ascends b-movie schlock. Rarely has debauchery drawn artistic circles around nobility as to be inviting. Those who look for film to traverse boundaries that broaden cinematic expectations (but actually demands it): this one's for the ages!

Tasty dialogue (Chris Eigeman at table). Members only club where the only requirements are wit and inertia, challenging the world to grow up...without them.

Beautifully shot, a sonic symphony. Hyper-kinetic & literate heavy (even silence has say). Contentment or existence?...seem to run parallel lives as if answers were separate from questions; appearing to each other as foreign objects trying to reconcile the same language while they tally heavy losses.

Aptly titled; thirty years after Godard laid foundation, his art form endures a deconstruction of film: accumulating those loose fragments that link our past to re-examine its possibilities - as if it were new again.

Fascinating court caper. Individual motives camped under the same roof; a house of cards with an ironic tone that never tips its hand.

Beautifully savage...a verbal tango. Envy & vanity swim in sexually current events that shape their appearance. Foreplay takes the role of grotesques staging their reflections in disguised exaggeration - smoke and circus mirrors; a tug of war where the two-headed monster tightens the noose, while its executioners provide them enough rope.

An immovable feast. Sparse & stark; the sand & gravel art: Bressonian bareness stripped of convention, slows to gentle patter where directness yields incidental humor in monotonous rhythm that never strikes a false chord.

Individual laws of equality subject to universal morality it upholds - compassion unaccustomed to callous hands that etched in stone the mold of collective harmony. No different from "modern civilization's" progression towards liberty: the ease by which loyalty to personal conviction finds gentle acceptance in the face of hardened tradition.

A sort of hustler's handbook. Survival of the shiftiest: sugar daddies & bad-ass mamas cookin' up home made pies. Technicolor noir, stylish grit; but enough venom (from that most sordid of pulp writers, Jim Thompson) oozes through.

An Avant-Garde cabaret. Beatnik Bernhard and her jazzy rips plays like one long monologue spliced into animated tableaux: the art of discomfort (proud self-portrait never shown publicly). Absurdly melodic, but with undertones of lament - a requiem for repressive times; historical footnotes who tapped their own beat, where modern cynicism claimed title that never dared self mockery.

Fassbinder-like melodrama. Characters seem to edit their own dialogue as they discharge rather than speak, discarding all ceremony - dead pan alley coupled with it's rumbling, semi-automatic delivery challenges you on its own turf.

Naturalistic piece, an interlude. Old world romance pays heavy debt to modern functionability of convenience & necessity (leaves little room for magic); love by default. In our quest for order anticipation is dulled, inadequate to surprise - money isn't shy and youth's a short term loan. Not that a new life offers better results, only no obligations where the choices are hers, defined not by rebellion but a state of grace.

Bizarre noir. Atmospheric dream-logic à la Lynch: you can't round out something with this many edges. Masked humor plays straight with crooked truths seen as angles (traditional element being ol' shamus gets stiffed...from his point of view).

Winger plays the tricky twist, adding another dementia to the femme fatale. You can't overthink an eclectic mystery (most significant clue being the title). A unique approach to an old setup that defies expectations - particularly if you have none.

Little light in the lens; like 6th grade homework (Cheaper by the Dozen?). Pastoral watercolor has tendency to force "cute": comic book drawings & silent film sketches; but skillfully carves nostalgia's genuine tone out of boy's fascination with father's god-like figure, skirting sentimental trap with smarts.

Horse & buggy portrait - nice trot without the pomp and hurry amid frantic cuts associated with this material. Backseat drive with window down, sleeves flapping...a cool easy breeze.

Fair dose of hysterics (arrangement by mutual accord, more bass than treble); where judge serves as counterpoint: the slow burn of the thinking man. He locks his doors at night because he's a realist, while questions remain open as ideals.

Doesn't pander social issues that rant pedantic & hypocritical; rather a platform on which observation requires distance - sedative tone above reactionary din balances measures equally: recognition & opportunity as alternatives to judgment lighten the weight.

Perfect for a gray afternoon and the day off. Left-footed gumshoe has horse by the wrong tail; though occasionally stumbles over miscues & sags around the middle, stays fit to course: never heightens into parody or slows for false sentiment (fast track to mediocre comedies). One-trick-pony who's no thoroughbred - a Rudolph shuffle of dicks & damsels that eases before it strains.

Not as fulfilling as the usual Rohmer, but intriguing, nonetheless. Even with a lesser payoff, Rohmer is never about getting there, it's the walk up.

Theatrically contrived, comes off as stagy; but when not fulfilling its dramatic obligations, the spontaneity is lax enough to make you yearn for 30's Paris Bohemia...and what we've lost: the openness of discovery's liberation through artistic necessity and sexual gamble, where there was enough space to fit time in.

Could have used a little more flesh, but it's all Kaurismaki - although a little heavy handed, tenderly crafted with a minimilist refinement.

Bordering on caricature, along with the occasional (and obligatory) Coen silliness; but with a hard bite to it - so if you like your poison with 30's gangsters spitting Chandler gab, then take a shot.

Convoluted as a whole, but taken as vignettes are masterfully done (Benigni & Fellini is a surrealist's dream unto itself). What comes through is his pure love of film which is unsurpassed - life as canvas for images it inspires. Made more poignant for being the maestro's last celebration of friends and lovers; old desires with younger memories.

Time is running out of space, as silence allows him to hear the voice of his imagination: a circus in the stars..."I love to remember, more than to live. And besides, what's the difference?"