Match Cut Madness 2: Best of the 90s

[megladon8]

Goodfellas

Fargo

[Idioteque Stalker]

Goodfellas is out to an early lead, but Pulp Fiction holds the tie-breaker...

The Losers Bracket is neck and neck -- can underdog Boogie Nights upset Filmspotting Madness Champion Fargo?

[megladon8]

Can we scrap this and give it to Spice World?

[Idioteque Stalker]

I've seen Spice World more times than I care to admit.

[Mal]

Pulp Fiction
Boogie Nights

[megladon8]

I've seen Spice World more times than I care to admit.

So I guess we are saving it for the MatchCut Madness: Best of All Time thread?

[Idioteque Stalker]

So I guess we are saving it for the MatchCut Madness: Beat of All Time thread?

I may swap it in over Aliens in the Play-In Round.

[Yxklyx]

Championship
Pulp Fiction vs. Goodfellas

Losers Bracket
Boogie Nights vs. Fargo

[DFA1979]

Championship
Pulp Fiction vs. Goodfellas

Losers Bracket
Boogie Nights vs. Fargo

[Skitch]

Championship
Pulp Fiction vs. Goodfellas (I'm not sorry)

Losers Bracket
Boogie Nights vs. Fargo (gun to my head)

[quido8_5]

Championship
Pulp Fiction vs. Goodfellas (I'm not sorry)

Losers Bracket
Boogie Nights vs. Fargo (gun to my head)

Bwahah. Losers bracket is definitely more difficult for me than the winners. Have to go with:

Winners
Goodfellas vs. Pulp Fiction

Losers
Fargo vs. Boogie Nights

[baby doll]

Championship
Pulp Fiction vs. Goodfellas (I'm not sorry)

Yeah, it was kind of a no-brainer for me as well. I find the pleasures of Scorsese's film (which are primarily behavioural, sociological, and stylistic) a lot more durable than the pleasures of Tarantino's film (structure, plot, and punchy dialogue), making it more fun to revisit. I wouldn't say it necessarily gets better with age but, of the two, it's the one that holds up better over time. Also, Scorsese and Pileggi seem to know the characters' milieu from firsthand experience whereas Tarantino has only seen movies about it. One telling difference between the two films is that, in Scorsese's film, one believes that Lorraine Bracco's character would get involved with Ray Liotta, whereas it's impossible to fathom how Maria de Medeiros got into an abusive relationship with Bruce Willis or why she stays with him (especially when he's willing to put her life in danger).

[Idioteque Stalker]

Fargo vs. Boogie Nights

I thought I knew ye, monster.

[Ezee E]

Goodfellas
Boogie Nights

The real winner: Big steadicams and cocaine

[Spun Lepton]

Championship
Pulp Fiction vs. Goodfellas

[transmogrifier]

Boogie Nights.

Abstain from the most boring decider in history.

[StuSmallz]

Championship
Pulp Fiction vs. Goodfellas

Losers Bracket
Boogie Nights vs. Fargo

[Ivan Drago]

Championship
Pulp Fiction vs. Goodfellas

Losers Bracket
Boogie Nights vs. Fargo

[quido8_5]

I thought I knew ye, monster.

At the end of the day, Boogie Nights just wasn't big enough.

[Mr. McGibblets]

Fargo
Fargo

[Idioteque Stalker]

Fargo
Fargo

Nice try.

EDIT: For now I will count this as one vote for Fargo, abstain from championship.

[Gizmo]

Losers bracket was my championship picks, but i was too late checking in again.

Pulp Fiction

Fargo

[StuSmallz]

In terms of Hollywood cinema (since that's pretty obviously what we're discussing here, rather than the New German Cinema or the independent films of Cassavetes, Jost, and Rappaport), the 1970s is an exceptionally overrated decade and it's still leagues better than any decade since. With the sole exception of Billy Wilder's Avanti!, even the best Hollywood films of the decade--McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Barry Lyndon, Days of Heaven--lack the synthesis of narrative, technique, and meaning that ones finds in the best studio-era films: Make Way for Tomorrow, Only Angels Have Wings, Notorious, Letter from an Unknown Woman, Johnny Guitar, The Tarnished Angels, Wild River. Hollywood directors today are more interested in being Genius Auteurs than they are in storytelling and craft.

I thought Notorious was very good, but still about a step and a half down from something like Vertigo, which I've always considered to be peak Hitchcock because of that incredibly vivid, psychologically immersive style, which I feel is more comparable to the general output of the New Hollywood Movement than it is to the Classical Era (which is probably part of the reason why the critics didn't appreciate it as much at the time, heh). Anyway, I'm not saying I feel that movies with relatively "heightened" aesthetics are automatically always better than ones with more subdued overall directions, as there are examples of the former that went a bit too crazy with their artistic expression, like Easy Rider (and even in some of Hitchcock's work, like the Dali sequence in Spellbound​ that I remember feeling gratuitous). But, at the same time, when a movie can successfully marry a more stylish approach with a certain amount of creative discipline, like the sensible flourishes that The Graduate took with its soundtrack, editing, cinematography, etc. to get us deeper inside Benjamin's emotional "headspace", I feel it serves to enhance the base-level emotions in a way you don't find often in the movies of the studio era, which is why I still have a special fondness for the films of the period that immediately followed the Classical Era to this day.

[baby doll]

I thought Notorious was very good, but still about a step and a half down from something like Vertigo, which I've always considered to be peak Hitchcock because of that incredibly vivid, psychologically immersive style, which I feel is more comparable to the general output of the New Hollywood Movement than it is to the Classical Era (which is probably part of the reason why the critics didn't appreciate it as much at the time, heh). Anyway, I'm not saying I feel that movies with relatively "heightened" aesthetics are automatically always better than ones with more subdued overall directions, as there are examples of the former that went a bit too crazy with their artistic expression, like Easy Rider (and even in some of Hitchcock's work, like the Dali sequence in Spellbound​ that I remember feeling gratuitous). But, at the same time, when a movie can successfully marry a more stylish approach with a certain amount of creative discipline, like the sensible flourishes that The Graduate took with its soundtrack, editing, cinematography, etc. to get us deeper inside Benjamin's emotional "headspace", I feel it serves to enhance the base-level emotions in a way you don't find often in the movies of the studio era, which is why I still have a special fondness for the films of the period that immediately followed the Classical Era to this day.

For me it's less a matter of "heighted" vs. "subdued" than a question of how purposeful a given film's style is. Whether one prefers Notorious or Vertigo (or Rear Window or Marnie for that matter), Hitchcock's stylistic choices are invariably motivated by the narrative. He would never move his camera simply to give a scene "energy" or frame a shot so as to pay homage to an earlier film. That's not to say Hitchcock didn't have influences, but there's a world of difference between Hitchcock's assimilation of German expressionism and Soviet montage and, for instance, De Palma's mechanical reproduction in The Untouchables of the Odessa Steps sequence in Battleship Potemkin, which is merely an act of theft.

Incidentally, the term "immersive" makes my skin crawl, especially in reference to classical Hollywood cinema, since this wasn't something people were talking about until about twenty years ago circa The Lord of the Rings as video game aesthetics started to infiltrate mainstream filmmaking. In Hitchcock's day (and even into the New Hollywood period), people were more likely to speak of expressiveness than immersion.

[Lazlo]

Goodfellas
Boogie Nights