Cinematic Throwbacks: May 1991/2001/2011

1991:

Okay, let's get into it. Hudson Hawk was one of the most notorious bombs of its era. It may have even been the first big bomb that I was aware of being a bomb. It was considered a big vanity project for Bruce Willis, who at the time was easily one of the 5 biggest stars in the world.

But it's GOOD, damn it! And the years only treat it better, as I get further away from this kind of Willis movie. Willis is a smug wisecracker in this movie, but that's his wheelhouse. All the best Willis action flicks have him in some variation on this persona.

The plot of this thing is a complete mess to be sure. I've never really understood it, but I feel like that's at least somewhat by design. The movie will occasionally just have things occur and just never explain how it happened. But it's all done with a wink. I've always felt that comedy can go a long way to smoothing things over in movies like this.

I mean, Willis and Danny Aiello literally sing songs outloud while committing burglaries. You think this is meant to be taken seriously?

This has always been one of my favorite Willis performances. Aiello is great. Andie Macdowell is really damn cute in this. Yeah the villains in this (Richard Grant and, yeesh, Sandra Bernhard) are completely insufferable, but you get to see them die.

This movie bombed, but it didn't really kill anyone's career. And it's gotten a deserved cult following over the years. 

This may be quite a hot take, but I think this is my favorite Bill Murray movie. I feel like this one has been kind of forgotten about though in the Murray filmography. People always mention Ghostbusters or Caddyshack or Stripes or some of his latter day serious stuff. Ironically this title fits how this movie doesn't get enough love.

Murray is a man with a plethora of neurosis, who essentially stalks his new therapist (Richard Dreyfus) all the way to his fancy New England lake house, where he is on vacation with his family. And Murray drives Dreyfus nuts through the rest of the film, while ingratiating himself to literally everybody else, which only makes Dreyfus madder. 

Murray is just hilarious in every scene and really likeable. Murray didn't always play the likable guy in his movies. Dreyfus is of great too as a complete dick of a man, but manages to not make you totally despise him. The two of them hated each other in real life but it works for this movie.

Yoda himself directed this. I had kind of a crush on Kathryn Erbe (Dreyfus's daughter) back when this came out, although she was actually pulling a Maggie Grace in Taken and playing a teenage girl even though in reality she was in her mid twenties. 

2001:

Aside from various franchise movies (and some Natalie movies) I was probably never more excited for a film than I was for this at the time.

Michael Bay, coming off of Armageddon. Teaming up with Jerry Bruckheimer again, who was still on his own roll. A giant epic war movie romance. The teaser trailer was one of the best ever. It had an incredible cast.

Then it opened, and the critical savagery it received was beyond absurd. Okay, look, it ain't Titanic, which the film clearly was aiming for. The love story in this is not nearly as good. But critics lambasted this movie like it was the worst movie ever made.

Bull. Shit. Pearl Harbor is a great film. I wonder what Bay's career trajectory becomes if this film got its due. (It WAS a big financial success at least) Some of his more recent attempts at more serious movies did get more respect.

People were so mad about the film inserting fictionalized characters into a real event (Titanic didn't?). As if there weren't tons of WW2 movies made DURING the war that did the same thing. And there are the usual assortment of inaccuracies that any historical film has. But here they were treated as capital offenses. Bay was even ranked over the coals for making the movie so jingoistic...then a few months later everyone was falling over themselves to prove how much they loved America. 

The film is kind of split into 3. First third is the romance setup. Second is the Pearl Harbor attack. Third is the Doolittle raid on Japan. The latter part gets short shrift. Maybe lopping 15 minutes off the love story and adding it to that last act would have been better.

The love story here isn't Titanic, but it's fine. This was when everyone really started to turn on Ben Affleck, and yeah his southern drawl is a little off, but he's solid. This was set up as a big Josh Hartnett moment. That didn't really pan out much but he's good in this. The film really did the most for Kate Beckinsale, who went from little known to a fairly big star after this. 

And the cast is loaded. It's rather ironic given whet we know now to see Jon Voight playing FDR, but he's good in it. Alec Baldwin and Tom Sizemore do great grizzle. This was one of the last good Cuba Gooding Jr. roles. There's a nice little secondary romance with Ewen Bremner and Jaime King that I always liked. We get very early Jennifer Garner and Michael Shannon. Dan Aykroyd has a small but vivid fully serious appearance as a Naval intelligence officer.

The main event here is obviously the attack on Pearl Harbor, and it remains one of the best 45 minutes of any movie. Completely gripping and very immersive. Great mix of practical fx and CGI. Even here people got mad that it was done like an action sequence. Well, I mean it does have action once it switches to the dogfights, but until then it's no more of an "action" sequence that the opening of Saving Private Ryan. They even got mad that it wasn't bloody enough (the DVD I have is the gorier version). I swear, if this exact same movie came out and only had a different director's name on it the response would have been very different.

Well, people never stopped hating Michael Bay, so they've never stopped hating this movie. And for the record I don't think he has ever again come close to reaching that level he was at in this era. He was off into Transformes land in just a few years.

2011:

Thor was the movie where Marvel Studios first showed that, yeah, not only are they going to make damn good movies, but they are going to make damn good movies out of characters that you wouldn't expect them to be able to.

I only knew of the character Thor because of Adventures In Babysitting. The character was kind of a joke, something silly. 

The smartest thing this movie did was play into the silliness. Sure, Thor has its grand Shakespearean opening act in Asgard (obvious why Kenneth Branagh was drawn to this), but even that is carried off with an enthusiastic wink. Much of the movie is a classic fish out of water comedy and a REALLY good one.

Thor is still one of the funniest MCU movies. It helped that Chris Hemsworth is just a charisma machine who can do no wrong. Kudos to the casting. Of the big 3, Downey and Evans were at least known commodities. Hemsworth only had a couple small roles and never a lead. It's preposterous to me that Tom Hiddleston was maybe going to be Thor at one time.

I didn't really like Hiddleston in this. I found him really just a whiny asshole. It's part of why I have been less excited about the Loki series, cause I felt this character was less interesting the more villainous he was. I still think it's probably the weakest part of the film, how he goes completely scorched earth (or scorched Asgard) so fast.

Everything on earth is great. Natalie is wonderful of course in her first and best (until next year I suspect) appearance as Jane Foster. Great chemistry with Thor (smitten Natalie is irresistible). Both Kat Dennings and Stellan Skarsgard are utilized very well here (unlike The Dark World which shoehorns both in). All the Coulson scenes are great. We get the first appearance of Hawkeye. We even get one of my favorite Stan Lee cameos.

The Asgard stuff IS good too, just not as much as the middle of the movie. Hopkins is great. They do a great job quickly establishing Sif and the warriors three. Nice casting coup with Idris Elba, who gets utilized more in later films.

I feel like this is an underrated movie in the MCU. I loved Ragnarok, but people acted like it was the first good Thor movie. No it wasn't.  

Hesher is an example of a movie having one truly original element in it. The title character played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt is not of this world. He's a hard rock stoner squatter with no backstory and no character arc. He is just a pure agent of chaos dropped into a story about a grieving family (Rainn Wilson, Piper Laurie, and the kid who is the main character overall).

Natalie Portman helped produce this, and she plays a supporting role in it as a cashier who befriends the kid. The movie tries to She's All That her up a bit by tossing on some oversized glasses and frumpy clothes. But she's still of course preposterously cute.

The film is all over the place almost by design. But it's always popping off weird moments. The director has never made another film, I guess. So just like Hesher, he was here briefly and then just gone. 

Will Ferrell has never really gone that hard into trying to do that transition from comedy to drama that a lot of other comedic stars have. As an actor he really only gave it a shot a few times, and this is his best. 

Here he plays an alcoholic, who on the same day loses his job and is locked out of his own house by his wife, who has left him and also left all his stuff strewn about their lawn. So he kind of just lives on his lawn for the movie. 

Now, this isn't hard drama. It's definitely in that dramedy zone, but Ferrell kind of nails the whole thing. He tones it all way down. Rebecca Hall is great as his one friendly neighbor. Laura Dern pops up for one terrific scene.

Sadly this is the last time Ferrell even really tried this sort of thing. As a producer he has been involved with some other more serious stuff. 

Okay, yes, this is a Woody Allen movie. We're not supposed to like any of these anymore. But this movie is really good, one of his best. This one was a surprise in how well it did. Allen movies didn't make money. They were made cheap. They made a little money. Rinse. Repeat.

So why did this hit? Well, it's pretty funny. Of all the stand-ins that Allen used for himself over the years, Owen Wilson was probably the best. Wilson fits this role like a glove. The humor is a little more accessible in this one, although some of the jokes and references fly by me. It also has something on its mind. The theme of how everybody always thinks some past time was better than the present really clicks. And the conceit of how Wilson goes back in time every night is delightfully simple.

Rachel McAdams plays Wilson's fiancee, who is awful for no real reason. But Marion Cotillard is dazzling as the woman Wilson keeps going into the past to see. And there are some fun performances by the actors playing all the historical figures.

Other non-deep dive flicks:

1991:

-Thelma and Louise: Obviously an iconic movie. Brad Pitt was made a star with this. I've watched it plenty of times on TV but just never got THAT into it. 

-Backdraft: Another movie that's good but I never got that into. 

-Truth or Dare: The Madonna doc that got tons of hype at the time. 

-A Rage In Harlem: Robin Givens in this movie...fuhgeddaboutit. 

-Only The Lonely: I saw this in theaters, cause John Candy was probably my favorite actor at the time. Nice little romantic comedy. 

-Soapdish: A comedy about the behind the scenes of a soap opera. Great cast, don't recall it being that funny. 

2001:

-Shrek: I went to a sneak preview of this. I always liked it, but never at the level of the great Pixar movies. This is still easily the best of them though.

-The Mummy Returns: Kinda hated the first one, but I liked this sequel. This started The Rock's movie career, and I sure didn't mind the new sexy version of the Rachel Weisz character. 

-Angel Eyes: One of the last J Lo movies I really looked forward to. It was so mis-marketed as some kind of ghost story, when it was actually a straightforward drama.

-A Knight's Tale: That one brief moment when Hollywood tried to turn Heath Ledger into a dashing leading man.

2011:

-Bridesmaids

-The Hangover Part 2: One of the worst sequels of all time. It's so bad. 

-The Tree of Life: My favorite Terrence Malick movie. Also my first introduction to Jessica Chastain. 

-Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides: I honestly would have to look it up to remember any specifics about this. I think this was the Penelope Cruz one. 

-Hobo With A Shotgun: A cool Grindhouse spinoff flick starring Rutger Hauer as the titular hobo. 

-An Invisible Sign: A legitimately strong dramatic performance by Jessica Alba in this. But nobody ever saw it so she got no credit. 

Coming in June...

X-Men First Class, Super 8 and Transformers: Dark of the Moon turn 10. The Fast and the Furious turns 20, as does Baby Boy. And two of the best comedies of the 90s, City Slickers, and Naked Gun 2 1/2 turn 30.