Cinematic Throwbacks: September 1990/2000/2010

1990:

Goodfellas is better than any of The Godfather films. I frankly don't think it's close. A strong case could be made that it's also the best thing ever directed by Martin Scorsese.

I hadn't watched this film all the way through in a really long time before doing the anniversary viewing, and I really got into it.

This is absolutely peak Ray Liotta, and peak Joe Pesci (just a few months before he menaced Kevin McAllister). Deniro was great as well. Only performance I never liked was Lorraine Bracco as Liotta's wife.

It's just a great exploration of this world, and told so well. Nothing is confusing, everything is interesting and entertaining. There's great comedy. Iconic scenes everywhere.

I have no idea when I first saw this. This is one of those films that has just always hung around as one I thought was really good, but not a favorite.

2000:

Now this film is completely forgotten. Even I forget about it. When I was looking up the September anniversaries I was like "oh I know that movie....oh I OWN that movie!"

It really shouldn't be lost in this way. The film was written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie, coming off of The Usual Suspects, and before he became a pretty regular name to work on big time projects (many involving Tom Cruise). The cast isn't quite big time, but it is led by Ryan Phillippe (then still a fairly big star, although this was one of the box office flops that kind of took him down) and Benicio Del Toro (right before he won his Traffic Oscar). Both are really good here. Phillippe seemed an odd fit at the time but now he seems a perfect fit. Del Toro is just superb.

The supporting cast is really good too, with really one of the last good Juliette Lewis performances, Taye Diggs, Nicky Katt, Herschel from The Walking Dead (head still intact) and James Caan in one of the all time examples of an actor showing up on screen and just taking over.

The story is pretty good, but the dialogue is where this film really shines. Sure it's overwritten. No lowlife criminals talk this intelligently. So what? It worked in The Usual Suspects and it works here.

The film has some really well staged action as well, including the obligatory final shootout. It's crazy to me that McQuarrie didn't direct another film until Jack Reacher, and then subsequently the last few Mission: Impossible movies. But the seed of why those films are all so good can be seen here. 

One of the great football movies, even if it is sometime shamelessly manipulative and not really historically accurate at all.

The first of the "based on a true story" Disney sports movies, and the best, this hits on all the things you want from a sports movie. The formula works really well. The racial harmony stuff is cheesy, sure, but watching it in 2020 feels timely (I know exactly which characters would be Trump voters). The football action is good, and the big finale appropriately rousing.

Denzel Washington is great, because he is always great, and I always liked how he isn't portarayed as always a nice guy. But tbh I always thought Will Patton gave the superior performance, and had the more interesting character. Many of the players are standouts, even if the only one who really went on to big things was Ryan Gosling. Kate Bosworth is the prettiest racist of all time. And I still enjoy young little Hayden Panetierre stealing all her scenes as Patton's daughter (just a few years before she became a brief mini-obsession with Heroes).

2010:

Grindhouse should have spawned a whole bunch of films. Instead the only major ones we got in its wake were the Machete flicks.

It's trickier than it seems to make something like Machete actually good. Make it too campy and you might enter Sharknado territory. Make it too serious and it's just not that fun.

This movie threads the needle. It's a lot.of fun, even now years later separated from Grindhouse (where one of the fake trailers was for Machete). Robert Rodriguez has always done great action on the cheap. Danny Trejo is just the coolest ever.

And we got both Jessica Alba and Michelle Rodriguez. That alone makes the movie for me.

It's an enjoyably loopy cast, cause it's never quite clear whether or not Robert Deniro (practically playing Trump), Steven Seagal, or Lindsay Lohan are aware of what kind of movie they are actually in.

I liked the sequel Machete Kills too, but that one got a little more campy and less grungy. 

Easy A was Emma Stone's ascension. She was already well on her way, and I had already bought in completely after Zombieland, but Easy A was her 1st time leading a movie, and she aced it. 

Stone gives one of the funniest performances by an actress ever. It is. I can sometimes have trouble finding a gorgeous woman funny, but she nails everything in this. Every line, every facial gesture, all of it. And it's still laugh out loud funny 10 years later, during which time she has been firmly cemented as one of the biggest movie star actresses, an Oscar winner, and probably a top 5 favorite of mine.

It's also just a really funny, sharply written comedy. It's definitely a movie. I mean it isn't always tied to realism. Nobody talks this cleverly all the time. But only a jackass would care when the laughs keep coming.

Aside from Stone the highlight is her parents (Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson), again impossibly funny but who cares? The scenes with all of them are perfect. 

Some of Stone's fellow students lean into charicature (all the religious kids, led by Amanda Bynes...remember when she was an actress?), and really nobody went on to do much (I was buying Aly Michalka stock at the time but that didn't work out), but this was the Emma Stone show then, now, and forever.

The Town was not the first movie that got Ben Afflrck's career going again. That would be Gone Baby Gone, but that movie he only directed. This one he directed and starred in, and gave one of his best performances.

It's a really great heist movie. The big finale set at Fenway Park is just masterful stuff. 

And it has a great ensemble, with a peak level Affleck, a great performance by Jeremy Renner that got him an Oscar nomination, the always lovely and underrated Rebecca Hall, and Jon Hamm as a real dickhead of an FBI agent. 

The only one I didn't really like was Blake Lively, who was taking her 1st real stab at adult stardom and kind of overdid it.

Coming next month: Really not that much. Apparently Octobers ending in zeroes are a little thin. But we do have The Social Network, Let Me In, and maybe we'll find something else.