Word: snazziest
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...TARZAN and SOUTH PARK: BIGGER LONGER & UNCUT It can be plausibly argued that there were more good cartoon features made in the U.S. this year than there were live-action films. Disney alone had Tarzan (its snazziest and most affecting feature since The Lion King), Fantasia 2000 (a rhapsody of sound and light) and, via Pixar, the deft, ingratiating Toy Story 2. And what can we say about Trey Parker's very un-Disney South Park that the film itself didn't sing in four-letter words and the cleverest original movie score in decades? Just that it's devilishly...
...Hong Kong crime films, wears his role as a good-bad cop dapperly in this good-middling drama set in Manhattan's Chinatown. He's the tough guy teaming with Mark Wahlberg's sweetly anguished type to battle a local triad. Foley (After Dark, My Sweet), who choreographs the snazziest New York car chase since The French Connection, specializes in close-up portraits of people sweating on the inside. But no matter how dank the moral dilemma, Chow will never break a sweat. In Hong Kong or New York, he's just too cool...
...their soaring melodies and plummy platitudes, R.&H. songs are secular hymns--liturgical music for the American mid-century. Sometimes, as in State Fair (originally written for Hollywood, now on view in a tatty theatrical version notable only as a showcase for Broadway's snazziest dancer, Scott Wise), the score is so wholesome that it practically cleans your teeth and does your homework while you hear it. But The King and I is smarter stuff, with perfect Rodgers ballads like Something Wonderful, beautifully sung here by the largely Asian cast...
Tarantino's guilty secret, which the international critics should have noticed, is that his films are cultural hybrids. The blood and gore, the cheeky patter, the taunting mise-en-scene are all very American -- the old studios at their snazziest. But Tarantino's hard guys also reflect a European sensibility, reminiscent of the existential gangster films of Jean-Pierre Melville; they talk all night about everything except what matters. With this marriage of Hollywood and the Continent, Pulp Fiction, which will open in the U.S. this fall, showed Cannes that the power of movies is all about energy, visual...
This is sadism with scruples. But in all his movies Seagal snacks on villains as if they were sunflower seeds. In Marked for Death he broke the lead villain's body -- snap! -- over his knee. In Under Siege, by far the snazziest of Seagal's films, he got to smash Tommy Lee Jones' head through a computer screen. Faced with a bunch of thugs in Hard to Kill, he used his fatal grace to dispatch all but the gang leader, then tossed his weapon aside to give the gun-toting goon a sporting chance. Talk about your Zen machismo...