Cinematic Throwbacks: November 1990/2000/2010

1990:

I was absolutely the exact right audience at the exact right time for Home Alone. And for an 11 year old in 1990 this movie was pure candy. At that age nothing was more cool than the idea of being at home all by yourself with no supervision. All the other stuff in this movie was kind of secondary to just that idea. But I loved the movie overall and it's maybe the 1st movie I really strongly recall the theater experience for. 

Then I reviled this movie. Look, at 11 years old this movie worked for me, but by, say, 13 or 14 I had started watching a lot more R rated movies and started listening to rap. There was nothing I could have been LESS interested in for basically a decade than watching freaking Home Alone.

But the years passed and I started to have fond feelings again for the movie. Nowadays I can enjoy watching this movie again for purely nostalgic reasons. There is such a warm feeling to a lot of this movie, and that helps to excuse that, honestly, a lot of this movie is not that good.

It has a lot of that "sitcom on a big screen" thing that a lot of comedies from this era have. Most of the big gags from that 3rd act battle with the Wet Bandits are not that funny tbh. And jesus, Macaulay Culkin is just insufferable in most scenes. He actually showed some acting ability later on, but man in this he is just the prototypical cloying child actor. 

But again, at 11 who cares? And there's good things in the movie too, don't get me wrong. Pesci and Stern are still very entertaining. The score (by John Williams) is very memorable. Some of the gags still hold up. The subplot with the scary old man still tugs at the heartstrings effectively. So it's not one that is among my very favorite Christmas movies, but on a nostalgic level it works. 

Okay, Rocky 5 is the first movie I have done a throwback blog about that I don't like. I only happen to own the movie because it came with a Rocky series DVD box set I got for Christmas once. And I figured what the hell. I haven't seen the movie in ages, so let's see how it comes off now. 

It still stinks. Seriously, it is an almost across the board failure, that makes every wrong decision and almost seems intent on punishing fans of the series to that point. It is a thief of joy.

Rocky has brain damage from the Drago fight. He has lost all his money. His son hates him. And the upstart fighter he has taken under his wing turns on him.

It's telling that a lot of this basic material was done far better in the subsequent Rocky sequel and the Creed films. The idea of bringing Rocky back to his roots is fine, but the story goes nowhere, and then because the series always concludes in a fight we get easily the series worst fight, a stupidly staged street brawl between Rocky and Tommy Morrison (who gives one of the worst performances ever put to film) that wants to be rousing but just isn't.

I'm not sure any other film series has so many good entries in it while simultaneously having one as putrid as this.

2000:

I never cared about The Sixth Sense. To me it was just a pretty mediocre movie with a good twist ending. 

But M. Night Shyamalan's follow up film...now THAT was the masterpiece. Seriously, Unbreakable is a nearly perfect piece of work. So many of Shyamalan's films went off the rails in various ways but in this thing every performance is just right, every shot is just right, every story beat hits, and even some of his odd comedy works.

I will admit that when I first saw this film I liked it, but I didn't GET it. I did not even realize that it was a comic book superhero origin movie. Although back in 2000 comic book movies were still pretty rare.

Bruce Willis was at his understated best. Sam Jackson was mesmerizing. Both were really at or near their peaks around this time. Shyamalan was the heavily hyped "new Spielberg" but this film kind of disappointed at the box office. It did well, but not Sixth Sense business, and then his next movie Signs was a huge hit. So Unbreakable got to be this so-called lesser film whose reputation grew. And today I think it's maybe the best regarded of those 3 films.

Shyamalan weaved this into his own cinematic umiverse  with Split and then Glass. Both good movies but neither one came close to this, his unquestioned best film.

2010:

This was the last film ever directed by the massively underrated Tony Scott. And it has ar least a case to be made for being the best ever last film from a director.

It was his last collaboration with Denzel Washington, a pairing that yielded a few classics (this along with Cromson Tide and the criminally underappreciated Deja Vu). Denzel is of course excellent, here paired with Chris Pine (fresh off of the Star Trek reboot) as a pair of train operators trying to stop a runaway train from derailing and spilling a bunch of toxic chemicals.

It's a welcome blue collar action movie, pretty realistic for the genre. Scott's frenetic editing jazzes it all up. It was a decent size hit but I don't think it ever really got its due. 

While not a great film by any means, Love and Other Drugs has a lot of great stuff in it. It has probably the most purely movie star charismatic performance we ever got from Jake Gyllenhaal. The same could probably be said for Anne Hathaway, who has never been this radiant (or naked, and yeah I didn't mind that either). Hathaway in particular really should have racked up at least some nominations for this thing.

The movie to be fair is a tonal mess. You have this often pretty serious romantic drama, but you also have this sort of low rent Seth Rogen comedy courtesy of Josh Gad, who plays one of the most thoroughly off-putting and out of place characters imaginable. I still hate Gad because of this.

Edward Zwick, of Glory and The Last Samurai, directed this, and it was a big change of pace for him. The stars really made this work.

Okay, time to look at some of the other movies from these months that didn't warrant a deeper dive....

November 1990:

-Graffiti Bridge: Remember when they made a sequel to Purple Rain?

-Three Men and a Little Lady: Remember when they made a sequel to Three Men and a Baby? 

-Predator 2: I still think this is probably the only Predator sequel that was good.

-Misery: Kathy Bates deservedly won an Oscar for playing one of the scariest characters in movie history.

-Dances With Wolves: Still never seen this one.

November 2000:

-Charlie's Angels: At the time I really liked this. This was peak Drew Barrymore for me. The sequel soured me on it big time. 

-The Legend of Bagger Vance: Remember when, at the peak of their respective movie stardoms, Will Smith and Matt Damon teamed up for an inspirational golf drama? 

-Little Nicky: The first misstep in a long time at that point for Adam Sandler. 

-Men Of Honor: Solid navy diver drama with Robert Deniro and Cuba Gooding Jr, when he was still trying to become a movie star. 

-Red Planet: This was the 2nd of that year's Mars movies. Both sucked. 

-The 6th Day: A pretty good latter day Schwarzenegger actioner. 

-How The Grinch Stole Christmas: Jim Carrey is so good in this, and I liked the movie at the time, but it didn't hold up. 

-Quills: I kind of forgot about this one. Peak Geoffrey Rush as the Marquis de Sade, and Kate Winslet in one of her best performances. 

November 2010:

-127 Hours: I thought this was a really good movie, and I have never rewatched it. Not after nearly passing out in the theater during the arm amputation sequence. 

-Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1: Remember all those Hallows? And how deathly they were? 

-The Next Three Days: I liked this Russell Crowe thriller, where he breaks his wife out of prison. 

-The King's Speech: Won a bunch of Oscars. Didn't do much for me.

So this concludes November. Which according to my research means next month is December. 

Cast Away turns 20, as does Finding Forrester, which is sure to be a bittersweet rewatch now that Sean Connery died.

Black Swan turns 10! The 1st movie I ever bought on bluray.