#1998 movies

[cressida-jayoungr]

One Dress a Day Challenge

November: Oscar Winners

Shakespeare in Love / Colin Firth as Lord Wessex

Year: 1998

Designer: Sandy Powell

I've featured some of the women's costumes from this film before, but the men deserve some attention as well. Lord Wessex wears this magnificent outfit when he comes to inform Viola that a match has been arranged between them. The embroidery on his doublet and cloak is simply jaw-dropping in its variety and intricacy. I've included some closeups to show both the details of the embroidery and the texture of the various materials.

It's a shame we can't see what he's got for footwear, and we also never see him wearing the hat. He also manages to make the ruff look like something a person might actually wear on a regular basis.

[retrocinemv]

𖥔 ࣪ ˖ 58. you've got mail (1998) dir. nora ephron

[sine-cinematography]

RONIN (1998) - Paris and the south of France

DIRECTOR: John Frankenheimer

CINEMATOGRAPHER: Robert Fraisse

[junospooky]

SLC Punk! 1998, dir. James Merendino 

[dark69wolf]

💖

[closetofcuriosities]

The Faculty - 1998 - Dir. Robert Rodriguez

[movieseverymonth]

Practical Magic

dir. Griffin Dunne

[i-adore-you-8]

m o o d

[adamwatchesmovies]

Wild Things (1998)

From its premise, you’re going to think that Wild Things is one kind of movie. I promise you it isn’t. My advice is to look at the poster. At the bottom of the screen are Matt Dillion and Kein Bacon. Above their heads is the title. Above it… is that Neve Campbell and Denise Richards, together in a pool of water, looking all wet and smoldering? Now you have a better idea of what kind of movie you’re in for.

High School guidance counselor Sam Lombardo (Matt Dillon) is shocked when one of his students accuses him of rape. Kelly Van Ryan (Denise Richards), daughter of the wealthy and popular Sandra Van Ryan (Theresa Russell), tells her story to the police. She’s backed by another student, Suzie Toller (Neve Campbell), who tells a similar narrative. Detective Gloria Perez (Daphne Rubin-Vega) and Sergeant Ray Duquette (Kevin Bacon) smell something wrong with this case and begin digging.

Knowing nothing about this movie, I had a bad feeling going in. I was reminded of an exchange in Promising Young Woman. “It's every man's worst nightmare, getting accused of something like that.” to which Cassandra responds “Can you guess what every woman's worst nightmare is?” At the risk of spoiling things, I’ll tell you this movie is not a court case drama and it isn’t about false rape accusations either. It’s a neo-noir erotic thriller. This is the kind of movie you’d watch by yourself and then turn off the second you hear a strange noise at the front door. You might not have been doing anything wrong, the scene you were on might not have been dirty but whoever it is that's knocking might think you were up to something.

Some people would call this film trashy, and it’s hard to disagree. There are a lot more sex scenes than necessary but I wouldn’t cut any of them out. Wild Things contains one twist after another, after another. It’s loaded with revelations that make you wonder who you’re supposed to be cheering for. The plot is wild and convoluted. The shocks continue even into the end credits, which are repeatedly interrupted with scenes that give more information on what exactly happened. It’s not the way most movies would handle this kind of tale but that doesn’t make it bad. You’ll have fun examining the clues, categorizing them under “legitimate” or “red herring”, thinking about what you would look at next and who you think is the real mastermind behind this thing that’s going on.

Wild Thing balances several different tones. At times, it almost feels like a comedy, particularly when Bill Murray comes in as Lombardo’s lawyer. Then, it becomes a thriller, then an erotic thriller. Then, a mystery. The blend isn’t always even, and some of the reveals come in so fast and last-minute, they kind of feel like afterthoughts. Still, it isn’t a movie you’ll easily forget and it’ll certainly make you grateful to have a pair of eyes to watch it with. Call it a guilty pleasure or a movie that’s unashamed of being exactly what it is. Either way, go watch it. I won’t tell anyone. (Full-screen version on VHS, May 16, 2021)

[kevinsreviewcatalogue]

Review: Dark City (1998)

Dark City (1998)

Rated R for violent images and some sexuality

<Originally posted at https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2023/04/review-dark-city-1998.html>

Score: 4 out of 5

Dark City is a film that failed at the box office in its time and, despite a critical reevaluation as one of the hidden science fiction gems of the '90s, still gets overlooked quite often nowadays, for one simple reason: despite its mind-bending plot and creative visual design homaging classic '40s/'50s film noir, it had the misfortune of coming out just a year before The Matrix, a sci-fi masterpiece with very similar themes about what we think of as reality being just an illusion designed to control us. This film was a much more cerebral thriller whose effects shots, while no less visually impressive, were a lot less punchy and action-packed, instead feeling like if the first half-hour of The Matrix got stretched to feature length, given a retro gloss, and focused mainly on Keanu Reeves slowly peeling away the layers of his world, saving the big action sequence for the very end. It's a moody, foreboding film that built up to a great reveal while slowly imbuing the viewer with a paranoid suspicion that their own world may not be "right", and while the finale wrapped things up a bit too neatly and conventionally for my tastes with a rather silly-looking confrontation, the meat of the film was still a slick and highly effective tale that I won't forget anytime soon -- ironic, given what the villains here like to do to people.

The film takes place in an unnamed city with vaguely mid-20th-century technology, aesthetics, and feel, specifically the kind lifted out of a Raymond Chandler novel, a place where the streets are always cloaked in shadows even during what feels like it should be the daytime -- and hey, while you may have childhood memories of sunny days, when's the last time you saw the sun, anyway? We start with a man who wakes up in a hotel room with no memory, only figuring out that his name is John Murdoch from the ID in his wallet, surrounded by the corpses of dead prostitutes that he probably killed, which is not a situation that most of us would want to stick around for so they can calmly explain everything to the police. On the run from the law and searching for both Emma, a cabaret singer who he finds out was his wife, and Dr. Daniel Schreber, who he finds out used to be his psychiatrist, John gets pulled into a twisted web as he's pursued by the Strangers, mysterious, inhumanly pale-skinned men in hats and trenchcoats who he soon finds aren't entirely human, and who seem to control the city from the shadows and regard him as a threat to their plans. Meanwhile, Inspector Frank Bumstead sets out hot on the tail of the suspected murderer, not knowing exactly what he's getting himself into.

I can't really go into much more detail about the plot. Like a lot of old-fashioned mysteries, this is a movie where part of the fun is piecing the puzzle together yourself and then the film revealing how close you came to the truth, albeit one that puts a sci-fi twist on the usual noir story. I can, however, speak to the production values and writer/director Alex Proyas' sense of style, and on that front, I was at once pulled into the film's world and wondering what awful truths lay outside it. The city is the kind of seedy place you'd set a hardboiled detective story, exaggerated to the point where it feels like a warped parody thereof and creating an unsettling feel that this place should not be. Some of the supporting cast members having spotty American accents (this was shot in Australia), something I'd normally ding a film for, only lent to the uncanny valley feel of the city, as did countless other little quirks that made the place feel like somebody trying to draw a picture of a mid-century East Coast metropolis without any reference points as to what that would look like beyond old movies. And that's before you get to the Strangers who are after John, who wear conspicuous trenchcoats and have names like "Mr. Book", "Mr. Hand", and "Mr. Sleep" that sound like somebody tried to come up with ordinary-sounding "John Smith" names to blend in and... didn't pull it off, on top of their general weirdness and stilted manner of speaking calling to mind the G-Man from Half-Life. While it takes a while to get to the "why" of the titular dark city, the film lets you know rather quickly that this is not a normal city, and even before we get to the big special effects shots, Proyas did a great job right off the bat heightening its artifice and pale imitation of humanity. More than anything, it felt like I was watching the darkest possible film adaptation of The Sims, predating the first game by a couple of years but otherwise, without spoiling anything, taking some of the series' central concepts and playing them for paranoid horror.

The cast also did great in making this world feel just the right mix of real and artificial. Rufus Sewell as John, Jennifer Connelly as Emma, and William Hurt as Bumstead all felt like they could've been lifted out of a real 1940s film noir, while Kiefer Sutherland played Schreber as a character wholly unlike the take-charge heroes he's been coded as since 24, a dweebish doctor who serves as the main characters' bridge between the world they know and what's really going on through his exposition. The special effects were not the focus, but they were astonishing to watch for a fairly low-budgeted '90s film, especially a key sequence where we witness the city's buildings shifting around as the Strangers' true power over the city is made clear. Only at the very end did it feel like Proyas ran out of ideas, as John's final confrontation with the Strangers after unlocking his true power ended with them shooting beams of light at each other with their minds while buildings crumbled around them. It all felt pretty goofy, like they needed to find a way to wrap this up and have the hero prevail, even though if I was writing this, there are some seriously dark directions I could've taken the story. The ending, I feel, underlines the big reason why The Matrix was the big late '90s sci-fi movie about reality being a lie that everybody remembers; when it did similar battles between the good guys and bad guys, they came in the form of epic shootouts and martial arts sequences straight out of Hong Kong.

The Bottom Line

Dark City is a film that doesn't get talked up nearly enough, even if I can't really say much more in a non-spoiler review. Ending aside, it makes a great companion to The Matrix as a more cerebral and noir-tinged take on very similar concepts, one that will, at the very least, make it very difficult for you to play The Sims the same way again. A big thank you to Popcorn Frights for screening it last week. Check it out.

[cressida-jayoungr]

One Dress a Week Challenge

May: Gold & Silver

Elizabeth / Cate Blanchett as Elizabeth I

Although this movie's costumes were known for being loose interpretations of historical styles rather than painstakingly accurate, they did do quite a faithful recreation of Elizabeth's actual coronation gown, right down to the tassels on the closure! The thing that is surprising is that it's just one of her regular dresses that she wears to a dance earlier in the film. I looked up the date of Elizabeth I's coronation, and it was two months after the death of Mary, so in real life she had ample time to have a new gown made for the occasion.

(EDIT: @theladyelizabeth mentioned on a reblog that IRL, Elizabeth wore Mary's coronation gown, just altered to fit her. But in that case, she still would be unlikely to be wearing it to dances!)

The dress looks far less grand without the accompanying ruff, jewelry, and ermine-edged cloak. In fact, I don't think I even registered that it was the same garment on first viewing.

[retrocinemv]

𖥔 ࣪ ˖ 51. rushmore (1998) dir. wes Anderson

[corythesaxon]

I’m watching the 1998 Godzilla movie again and it makes me really dislike the humans in this movie.

[junospooky]

SLC Punk! 1998, dir. James Merendino  

[supernightboy08]

My Favorite 1998 Movies:

1. A Bugs’ Life (1998)

2. Mulan (1998)

3. Pokémon The First Movie (1998)

4. Dark City (1998)

5. The Prince Of Egypt (1998)