My only memory of The Basketball Diaries is that parts of it were filmed in my home town and a bunch of the girls in my class went to the set to meet Leonardo DiCaprio... they said he was kind of a jerk but that Mark Whalberg was nice. That doesn't help, does it?
I guess I'll just play it safe and put in the fifth spot. I'm not real happy with my list so far anyway, especially since I can't seem remember these movies well enough to comment on them intelligently. Also, the seventies continue to scare me.
Fun fact:
The Ice Storm and
Boogie Nights opened two weeks apart in 1997. I saw them back-to-back on the same night and went in expecting it to be one of the greatest double-bills ever. As the Top Five below indicates, I came out a little disappointed. The curse of high expectations? Maybe.
Here goes nothing.
5.
The Basketball Diaries (Scott Kalvert, 1995) — A film I'm a little scared to revisit (though I think the backlash against Juliette Lewis had already begun by '95), but Carroll's path from high school basketball star to heroin junkie to introspective poet (and extroverted punk act) in many ways mirrors aspects of the culture as a whole from 1970 to 1980 (when
Catholic Boy hit record stores).
4.
Tillsammans (Lukas Moodysson, 2000) — The "me decade" Swedish-style, from the director of
F'ing Amal and
Lilya 4-Ever. It might not be quite up to the level of those other two films, but its disillusioned yet sentimental look back on the seventies worked better for me than Ang Lee's take in
The Ice Storm. The English title is
Together, by the way.
3.
The Falcon and the Snowman (John Schlesinger, 1985) — Maybe one of the earliest films eligible for this Top Five,
Falcon has aimless young men getting involved in drug dealing as a way to get by in the world (a requisite for this list, almost), then taking their burgeoning capitalist dreams a step further and selling secrets to the Russians. I actually don't remember much more than that, so I'm just going to cross my fingers and hope it's half as good as I remember.
2.
Jesus' Son (Alison Maclean, 1999) — Plenty of other drug movies could have appeared on this list — the trend-setting
Drugstore Cowboy and not-so-hot
Blow come first to mind — but what sets
Jesus' Son apart for me is its unexpectedly brilliant (and brilliantly expected) flashes of humor in some otherwise tragic material. As Ebert wrote to begin his review, "Thinking at first I am seeing still one more road movie about a druggie, I find I am wrong.
Jesus' Son surprises me with moments of wry humor, poignancy, sorrow and wildness. It has a sequence as funny as any I've seen this year, and one as harrowing, and it ends in a bittersweet minor key, as it should, because to attach this story to a big climax would be a lie, if not a crime." I can't remember how much this film has to say about the seventies, but I'm just going to assume it belongs on this list anyway.
1.
Donnie Brasco (Mike Newell, 1997) — Screenwriter Paul Attanasio and director Mike Newell make a damn fine team, and Al Pacino, Johnny Depp, Michael Madsen, and Bruno Kirby (on this list twice!) make a damn fine cast. I hope history doesn't treat it as some lesser version of
Goodfellas, because this film easily stands on its own. The period detail is fantastic, and the (slightly) revisionist take on the mob genre may have helped pave the way for
The Sopranos.
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