The 5 Best Generation X Filmmakers
Generation X has taken over the movies. Just this fall, new films from David O. Russell, Ben Affleck, and Quentin Tarantino promise to be major players come awards time. So who are the five best American filmmakers under 50?
5. Darren Aronofsky
Arrogant enough to turn down the opportunity to direct Batman Begins, the Brooklyn-born filmmaker has made some surprising choices. After starting out in David Lynch territory with Pi, he threatened to disappear in a fog of epic sci-fi weirdness with The Fountain but returned to Earth in triumph with the agreeably gritty and surprisingly straight-on The Wrestler, which relaunched Mickey Rourke and showed an unexpected depth of feeling and humanity. Then came Black Swan, a worldwide sensation that deservedly won Natalie Portman an Oscar and managed to be cerebral, trashy, arty, and sexy all at the same time. Now Aronofsky is going off in yet another direction, steering the mega-budget Bible epic Noah with Russell Crowe, which sounds like either a disaster or a sensation but seems guaranteed to make an impression.
4. Paul Thomas Anderson
PTA, still only 42, is a problem case: His first two films Hard Eight, a mean little noir set in Las Vegas, and the classic 1970s epic Boogie Nights, made him a force, a filmmaker who could design characters as well as the best playwrights while combining music and pictures to make scintillating cinema.
Inspired by Robert Altman’s multi-character pieces, he employs a fluidity of camera movement and creates a broad canvas with exacting concentration and dedication. Enter a Paul Thomas Anderson film, and you’re engulfed and awed. Yet he has now made three films (or four, if you count Magnolia and its Tom Cruise character) about rage-fueled misfits — Punch-Drunk Love, There Will Be Blood and now this fall’s The Master. All three films are mesmerizing character studies, and the latter two feel as firmly grounded in their settings as anything you’ve ever seen, but they all end with the equivalent of a shrug. If Anderson returns to this theme again, it may start to feel old.
3. Wes Anderson
Does anyone with the aggressively goofy The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou on his resume belong on this list, especially if it’s the same guy who made the aggressively dull The Darjeeling Limited? Yes, because Anderson has an originality of vision — quirk to the max — that only Tarantino can match, because Bottle Rocket did so much with so little, because Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums are among the best films of their era, and because Fantastic Mr. Fox was a perfect little jewel, as strange and pretty and funny as childhood itself. Keeping it simple, Anderson had a big arthouse hit this summer with the lightly engaging adolescent fable Moonrise Kingdom, which seems certain to earn him another screenwriting Oscar nomination.
2. Steven Soderbergh
At times Soderbergh seems to be scattering his talents in too many directions — after his breakthrough as a blockbuster man with Erin Brockovich, Traffic, and Ocean’s Eleven, he veered into imitation noir (The Good German), low-budget titillation (The Girlfriend Experience,) limp satire (The Informant!), TV (K Street), turgid sci-fi (Solaris), and documentary (And Everything Is Going Fine), not to mention the interminable four-hour propaganda piece Che. But with Contagion and Magic Mike, Soderbergh has returned to the top, making intelligent, arty mass-market films with terrific acting and fast-moving stories. Now that he’s proved he can do it all, he should continue doing what he does best.
1. Quentin Tarantino
QT seemed to be fading slightly with his overly indulgent and frantically allusive Kill Bill films, but there is no doubt that Inglourious Basterds put him back at the center of the conversation with eight Oscar nominations and $320 million in worldwide box office. Tarantino rewrote the book on what was cool with Reservoir Dogs in 1992 and the best film of the 1990s, Pulp Fiction in 1994, and for several years worshipful wannabees mimicked him, to increasingly tiresome effect. No one can write dialogue that’s as pungent, funny, and yet believable as his, and both Kill Bill films and Inglourious showed off his increasing skill as a master of image. Excitement is unrestrained for his Christmas Western about an escaped slave Django Unchained, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jamie Foxx.
****
Related at PJ Lifestyle on movies:
10 Reasons Why Pulp Fiction Is Still Cooler Than a $5 Milkshake
8 Reasons Why Jackie Brown Beats Pulp Fiction
More on Generation X at PJ Lifestyle:
Praising Tarantino’s “originality of vision” would be like lauding Bergman’s “light touch” or Fellini’s “realism.” Are we really talking about the same guy??
Tarantino is the shallow, derivitive Lady Gaga of movies: predictable, self-indulgent yet he easily fools young people who don’t know any better that he’s a genius.
Pulp Fiction is the most overrated film of the 1990s. When I felt I couldn’t put off seeing it any longer, my friend and I sat through it and muttered our (correct) predictions about what would happen next (“He’s gonnna say he put the watch up his ass”) and observations about his pointless, lazy rip offs (“Oh, please! A Kiss Me Deadly suitcase now?)
The jokes aren’t funny. No one has ever been able to explain to me why “Royale with cheese” is considered the height of wit. The dance sequence is boring, and the concept restaurant in which the servers are dead movie stars is something out of JG Ballard circa 1975. We’re meant to be amazed and astounded that lowlifes have… tattoos!! Wow!
Nobody who is familiar Ballard or Flannery O’Connor or any number of superior, earlier artists can possibly do more than yawn their way through a Tarantino movie.
Why is everyone impressed by the opening scene of Reservoir Dogs, in which they’re arguing about Madonna? It is supposed to be so original and “deconstructionist” and “po-mo” but the characters on Friends and Cheeers had similar conversations about movies and (other) tv shows.
http://www.tvrage.com/Cheers/episodes/32493
His only good movie was True Romance, and that’s because someone else was wisely chosen to direct.
Also, Inglorious Basterds makes no damned sense:
http://www.cracked.com/article_19920_6-movie-heroes-saved-by-gaping-plot-holes.html
http://www.cracked.com/article_18684_6-movie-heroes-who-actually-made-things-worse.html
I agree with your general critique of QT as overrated and Pulp Fiction as the most overrated movie of the ’90s. (And if you want to put a QT takedown on your list of articles to do for PJ Lifestyle then by all means…) BUT, I do take issue:
“His only good movie was True Romance, and that’s because someone else was wisely chosen to direct.”
True Romance sucks. Tarantino at his most juvenile until the self-indulgent embarrassment of Death Proof in 2007. But his real masterpiece is his most underrated and mature film, Jackie Brown:
http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2012/05/04/8-reasons-why-jackie-brown-beats-pulp-fiction/
Jackie Brown is the only Tarantino film I have seen that I actually like. Don’t get most of these other directors in this list either, I find some of the films sort of okay, none I have seen something I would have wanted to watch a second time.
This is a list of men whose film failures far outnumber their successes. What this tells me is that their “vision” is hit-or-miss, and that in essence, they don’t really know what they’re doing.
In my opinion the possible exception could be Tarantino. Something is missing in screen plays and the realization of those screen plays today and I confess I don’t know what it is. I DO know that when I can watch “Ladies of Leisure” starring an unknown Barbara Stanwyck from 1930 and directed by Frank Capra, and find it more interesting than the majority of films made by these 5 wunderkids, something’s wrong in Mudville. Even B-movies from 1933 like “Bed of Roses” with Constance Bennett have a way of drawing you into the story.
Try “The Millionaire” (1931) on for size and you’ll find yourself drawn into what should be a pretty boring film about a millionaire posing as a poor guy and drawn into a gas station feud. Just saw the new “On The Road” and was put to sleep.
As I was reading this list, I thought, I must have misread the title. This list makes much more sense as a “Top 5 Most Overrated Gen X Filmmakers.” Tarantino? Anderson (x2)?
Weak sauce.