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Paul W.S. Anderson is not a director known for producing artistic films and this is no exception, but what he does deliver in Event Horizon is one of the most original and terrifying horror movies of the 1990s. Starring Laurence Fishburne as Captain Miller, Sam Neill as Dr. William Weir, Kathleen Quinlan as Peters, Joely Richardson as Lt. Starck, Richard T. Jones as Cooper, Jack Noseworthy as young Justin and Jason Isaacs as DJ who are all on-board a ship at some point in the future whose purpose is search and rescue.

The Last King of Scotland is the story of Idi Admin (Forest Whitaker), the leader who came to power in Uganda in a coup in the 1970s.  But the story is told through the eyes of Dr. Nicholas Garrigan (James McAvoy) who is bored with his life in Scotland and decides to go and see the world, but lacking the imagination to select a place to visit, closes his eyes, spins a globe and makes a promise to himself that he will go to whichever country his finger lands on.  Obviously that country is Uganda.

The fifth entry in my Great Directors series profiles Steven Soderberg best known for his work with for his work with Ocean’s Eleven and its sequels and Erin Brokovich.  He was born January 14, 1963, in Goergia, in the US.   Steven’s interest in film began at least in high school and, upon graduation, he moved to Hollywood to begin his career.

His first cinematic break was very dramatic and came in the form of sex lies and videotape, which was released in 1989, which received the prestigious Palmes d’Or  at the Cannes Film Festival, the independent spirit award for Best Director, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Writing, with the screenplay having been written by Soderbergh himself, and in 2006 was inducted into the US National Film Registry for preservation. He is prone to casting Julia Roberts, Topher Grace, Don Cheadle, and George Clooney along with many others.  A little known fact is that he often works as his own director of photography under the name of Peter Andrews, which is the first and middle name of his father.

The Limey is a 1999 Steven Soderbergh-directed, Lem Dobbs-written crime thriller in the neo-noir style, but with drastically different, carefully fragmented editing that gives the film a wonderfully novel feel and imparts the meaning of what is being said or done in a much different way than the Hollywood staple method of simply splicing things together into a chain. It is a story of revenge; Wilson (Terence Stamp) has recently been released from prison in Britain to find that his daughter has been killed in Los Angeles and he travels there to discover why and if there was foul-play as he suspects, to avenge her death.

Upon his arrival in Los Angeles he seeks out the man who sent him the newspaper clipping informing him of his daughter’s Jenny’s (Melissa George) death: Eduardo Roel (Luis Guzman). Roel is an ex-con himself who was a friend of Wilson’s daughter Jenny and provides him with assistance since Wilson finds Los Angeles a very strange and alien environment.

Together with Roel, Wilson meets Jenny’s acting teacher and best friend and together the three of delve into the underworld of Los Angeles in an attempt to discern how and why Jenny’s boyfriend Terry George (Peter Fonda) may have had her killed. Wilson is quickly established as a very dangerous character in an early scene where he leaps from a dead calm into a tortuously dominant hold on a thug to which he is asking questions and, after being savagely beaten by those employed by that thug, returns to gun calmly gun all of them down one-by-one, leaving only one to flee the scene of Wilson’s blood-spattered face screaming for the man to, “Tell him I’m coming!”

Together with fantastic performances by Stamp, Fonda and Guzman, particularly, director Soderbergh and writer Dobbs weave careful editing into the film by constantly fragmenting both the soundtrack and screen action into often out-of-sequence groupings. It is referred to as fragmenting by Soderbergh and it allows for the ability of a film to really show not only that a character is thinking, but what he is thinking; viewers are allowed to see the film from his point-of-view, inclusive of many of his thoughts, which leads to conversations’ audio often coming out of sequence with the action shots of the speaking, flashbacks with dialogue superimposed, and other techniques.

Both the director and writer, speaking after the release, reportedly wished they had fragmented the movie more so than they did. What they did, however, changes the movie from something other than just a simple, but great crime thriller into a new aspect of cinematography that has continued with Soderbergh into later films and increased in general usage greatly since The Limey‘s release.

The movie is fantastic and definitely something that captures both the spirit of an indie movie combines with that enough of a mainstream appeal that its poor box office showing is surprising. Perhaps, had it been released in this environment, with American audiences more accustomed to Cockney rhyming slang and a greater deal of cinematic complexity, and even Soderbergh’s style specifically, it would fare a great deal better. It is certainly something that will make for a great viewing by a viewer with even the slightest patience to allow a movie to play out in front of themselves. It is beautiful, surely, but not so richly complex that it is challenging to view. Just sit back and enjoy it and the startlingly effective performance by Terence Stamp!

#08 – Will Hunting, GOOD WILL HUNTING

“Why shouldn’t I work for the NSA? That’s a tough one, but I’ll give it a shot. Say I’m working at NSA. Somebody puts a code on my desk, something nobody else can break. So I take a shot at it and maybe I break it. And I’m real happy with myself because I did my job well. But maybe that code was the location of some rebel army in North Africa or the Middle East. Once they have that location, they bomb the village where the rebels were hiding and 1,500 people I never had a problem with get killed. Now the politicians are saying, ‘Send in the marines to secure the area’ because they don’t give a shit. It won’t be their kid over there, getting shot. Just like it wasn’t them when their number was called because they were pulling a tour in the National Guard. It’ll be some guy from Southie taking shrapnel in the ass. And he comes home to find that the plant he used to work at got exported to the country he just got back from. And the guy who put the shrapnel in his ass got his old job, because he’ll work for 15 cents a day and no bathroom breaks. Meanwhile my buddy from Southie realizes the only reason he was over there was so we could install a government that would sell us oil at a good price. And of course the oil companies used the skirmish to scare up oil prices so they could turn a quick buck. A cute little ancillary benefit for them but it ain’t helping my buddy at 250 a gallon. And naturally they’re taking their sweet time bringing the oil back and maybe even took the liberty of hiring an alcoholic skipper who likes to drink martinis and play slalom with the icebergs, and it ain’t too long until he hits one, spills the oil and kills all the sea life in the North Atlantic. So my buddy’s out of work and he can’t afford to drive, so he’s got to walk to the job interviews, which sucks because the shrapnel in his ass is giving him chronic hemorrhoids. And meanwhile he’s starving because every time he tries to get a bite to eat the only blue plate special they’re serving is North Atlantic scrod with Quaker State. So what do I think? I’m holding out for something better. Why not just shoot my buddy, take his job and give it to his sworn enemy, hike up gas prices, bomb a village, club a baby seal, hit the hash pipe and join the National Guard? I could be elected president.”

Read the rest of the list, including the comments, at Alternative Reel.com