Back again with LG OLED Score ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Chris Fujiwara, Executive Chairperson of Edinburgh Film Festival shares his Top 5 films of the 1990s with LG OLED Scores. Great Times with Great Movies, even with Great Insight! Have you watched any?

Khrustalyov, My Car! (Aleksei German, 1998)

In the 1990s, some in the West celebrated the collapse of the Soviet Union by proclaiming it the end of history. It makes sense to start our cinematic time-machine trip to that decade with Aleksei German’s vision of a moment in Soviet history when which way things would go was just as unclear. German presents the Moscow of Winter 1953 (the time of Stalin’s death) as a grotesque carnival. Every scene overflows with clutter, as if a thousand cabinets, shut for half a century, were suddenly opened to let their contents spill over the screen. Once thought forbidding, Khrustalyov, My Car! has probably become more accessible today because of its game-like structure: the journey of the hero, a high-ranking brain surgeon who undergoes humiliation and rehabilitation in a single night, involves a series of micro-rituals of passage (such as climbing a wall on a ladder, sitting on top, and tipping over backwards). The ebullience of the film, shot in gleaming black-and-white with an improbably energetic camera, never flags.

-Cinematic Quality ★★★★★
-Visual Beauty ★★★★★
-Recommended to watch on LG OLED ★★★★★

*Overall ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood, 1992)

In making Unforgiven, the most praised of the several good or great films he made in the 1990s, Clint Eastwood is conscious that he is not just making a good classical Western but summarizing and criticizing the American myth of the redemptive power of violence. The pervasive darkness of Unforgiven lingers in the mind—it is one of the most nocturnal of Westerns—but some of the film’s most defining moments are its simplest and brightest: Eastwood (playing a reformed bad man who is lured out of retirement) tenderly explaining to a scarred prostitute why he refused her offer of a “free one”; Gene Hackman looking forward to watching the sun set from the porch he’s adding to his ramshackle house; Morgan Freeman’s discovery that he can no longer kill. Quintessentially American, too, is Eastwood’s quick and elegant construction of images in which one person, one form, is played against another for maximum impact.

-Cinematic Quality ★★★★★
-Visual Beauty ★★★★★
-Recommended to watch on LG OLED ★★★★★

*Overall ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Flowers of Shanghai (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1998)

In this ravishing object of wonder, set in a high-level brothel in late-19th-century Shanghai, Hou Hsiao-hsien presents a world that is closed on itself in time and space. When not further isolating themselves with opium, its inhabitants amuse themselves with drinking games and talk about almost nothing but affections and disaffections; whatever may be happening outside is never mentioned—except in one scene in which noises in the street prompt a few of the characters to go the back of the set to look out a window. Their report when they come back is obscure—some people are investigating something in a back alley—but it satisfies everyone. Sex, if it happens, happens offscreen, and it is clear in any case that sex cannot be not the only reason for the women’s power to monopolize the attention and interest of the men. Everything in the film blends together—costumes, decor, props, the grace and naturalness of the actors—and everything glows with an intensity that might come from the viewer’s own longing to merge with the spectacle.

-Cinematic Quality ★★★★★
-Visual Beauty ★★★★★
-Recommended to watch on LG OLED ★★★★★

*Overall ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

A Tale of Autumn (Eric Rohmer, 1998)

Eric Rohmer’s late-period masterpiece resembles Hou’s Flowers of Shanghai in that its characters are concerned mainly with love relationships between men and women. As Marie Rivière (as a bookseller who seeks to play matchmaker for her wine-grower friend) says at one point: “There are a thousand ways to waste time. This way is no more stupid than another.” A Tale of Autumn is grounded in the sunniness of Southern France and in everyday places and concerns: we visit Rivière’s bookstore, Béatrice Romand’s vineyard, and the apartment where Romand’s son studies; Alain Libolt (the widower whom Rivière ensnares with a personal ad) talks briefly about his work. This surrounding reality contrasts with the almost exclusive preoccupation of the dialogue with love, desire, or their possible emergence. Rohmer’s style achieves perfection: each shot opens toward something new, continuing a spiraling series of misunderstandings, riddles, and postponements.

-Cinematic Quality ★★★★★
-Visual Beauty ★★★★★
-Recommended to watch on LG OLED ★★★★★

*Overall ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

A Brighter Summer Day (Edward Yang, 1991)

Edward Yang’s portrait of 1960 Taiwan provides the feeling of a complete view of a world whose essential characteristic is that it is incomplete. The teenage hero’s parents have carried with them to Taiwan their memories of their interrupted lives in China, along with a radio that, after a certain point in the film, ceases to receive signals. The younger generation form gangs and fight one another in pointless turf battles. Their culture is formed out of an American popular culture that they absorb and emulate in their own way (the English title of the film comes from the hero’s sister’s attempt to transcribe the lyrics of “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” from the Elvis record). The characters of the film are no less stuck in a nightmare than those of Khrustalyov, My Car!, though the weather and landscape are subtropical, and the cruel authorities are anti-communist. Doomed never to master their world, the young protagonists possess a vulnerability that is indistinguishable from their ferocity.

-Cinematic Quality ★★★★★
-Visual Beauty ★★★★★
-Recommended to watch on LG OLED ★★★★★

*Overall ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

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