Cinematic Throwbacks: October 1992/2002/2012
1992:
So here is where it all began, the career of my favorite director of all time.
Yeah, nobody remembers Hero. This is one of those movies that is kind of lost to time. I actually saw it in theaters, at a time when seeing something in theaters was still kind of a rarity for me. I don't think I saw more than maybe 15 movies in the theater in 1992.
But way back in 1992 I didn't know who the hell Quentin Tarantino was. And what the hell was a reservoir dog? This movie was not on my radar at all.
It wasn't until a couple years later when Pulp Fiction came out and forever changed what I thought a movie could be that I went back and checked out Tarantino's debut. And even then I wasn't quite into it. It took years and repeat viewings to fully appreciate it.
The movie retroactively has achieved a kind of legendary status, but it wasn't much of a hit at the time. The origin of it is pretty well known, that Tarantino wrote it while working at a video store, and the script found its way to Harvey Keitel, who helped get it made.
I saw it after Pulp Fiction, and wasn't that into it on first viewing. Whereas Pulp was kind of nonstop iconic scenes and had a lot of action and violence, Dogs is at times a lot more slowly paced. It shares more in common with Tarantino films like Jackie Brown or Inglorious Basterds.
It has all the iconic Tarantino flourishes, from the fantastic soundtrack to the cool camerawork, to the cast all giving top notch performances.
Keitel was very much a known commodity at the time, but not so with the rest of the main cast. Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, Steve Buscemi. They had maybe appeared in a few things but certainly weren't well known. And they are all amazing in this, particularly Buscemi who is just a razor sharp comedic missile here.
There are too many iconic scenes to list. The ear cutting scene. The Madonna conversation. The scene where everyone gets their names.
There's a few things that aren't great. Chris Penn is not very good, and a couple of the flashback scenes feel a little inconsequential. But it is one of the best debuts ever from any director.
Absolutely no idea what drew me to this. But watching it today it feels like comfort food, a real throwback to the kinds of star-driven mainstream films that just don't get made anymore.
So, there is a plane crash. Only a borderline homeless guy played by Dustin Hoffman is there to get the exit door open and get people out alive. Once he takes off his pricey shoes. Through circumstances, even though everybody gets out alive, nobody knows who the mystery savior was.
On the plane is a reporter (Geena Davis), who fuels a huge story about the search for the mystery hero. Where is Hoffman? Well, trying to run his various scams and maybe stay out of prison. He is in fact in jail when a homeless friend of his (Andy Garcia) swoops in and is proclaimed the hero and given his million dollar reward.
It works, because Garcia comes off as genuine and warm, while Hoffman is seriously off-putting. Davis is also in love with Garcia after he gets cleaned up.
The movie's media satire is definitely dated, and of course nobody would care this much about this story on a national level. The story still works though.
And the cast is great. This might have been my first real exposure to Hoffman, and his shifty, fast talking performance is tremendously entertaining. He's never turned into a good guy, buy he's a likable scoundrel. Davis is lovely. Garcia is likable.
Speaking of favorite actresses, in 2002 nobody not named Portman rated higher with me than Katie Holmes.
2002:
Well, at least this movie that Michael Moore made about the United States insatiable gun culture caused people to look inward and realize that owning all these guns doesn't make anybody safer.
😬😬😬
Well, yeah.
I hadn't seen anything of Moore's before this, aside from his one fiction film Canadian Bacon, but he had done some noteworthy stuff. I was at least aware of his breakthrough doc Roger & Me cause of the title.
Moore is probably the best to ever do it at this artform. Making documentaries that don't just tell a story or convey information, but are really superb entertainments beyond that.
Bowling For Columbine obviously springs from the Columbine shooting 3 years earlier. And there is a lot of material centered around that, but Moore springboards from there to go after George Bush and the NRA and the military industrial complex. It's all of one big piece that has fucked up this country.
But the movie is also really funny. It's just that Moore mixes in jokes with harrowing stuff. I think now that old news clips exist just a click away that this format doesn't hit as hard as it used to (Moore's last couple docs felt like leftovers a little). But the topic is timeless. Moore could easily do a sequel to this, but as it stands this film is probably.as timely as ever right now.
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The Spring Breakers of its day, The Rules Of Attraction also collected a cast of largely young, squeaky clean stars and set them loose inside a depravity filled hard R film.
The film is based off a book by Bret Easton Ellis, who also wrote American Psycho, which became a pretty successful movie just before this one and likely got this movie made. The director was Roger Avary, who had co-written part of Pulp Fiction and looked to maybe be another of those hotshot 90s directors until he kind of just vanished. RoA was his first movie in nearly a decade. And again after this movie he kind of just went away. Strange career.
The cast was led by James Van Der Beek, in a huge departure from his clean cut Dawson's Creek image as one of a collection of upscale college students spending most of their time either drinking or drugging or fucking, and sometimes more than one at a time.
Also taking a blowtorch to their image at the time was Jessica Biel. Some other up and comers like Kate Bosworth and the dazzling Shannyn Sossamon take a dark turn. There's even a "holy shit that's a Fred Savage cameo" moment.
It's a nihilistic movie for sure and kind of makes you feel icky at times. But it also has some virtuosic directing. It seriously has 4 or 5 of the best scenes in any movie of that year. There's an amazingly dense and dizzying montage where Kip Pardue recounts his European trip. And right there in the middle of this blackest of black comedies is a devastating scene of a character whose name we don't even know committing suicide.
It remained the big screen peak for most everyone involved, except for Biel (who had a nice movie run pre-Timberprick). I don't know how we couldn't find a way to make the gorgeous Sossamon a big star.
Here is where Adam Sandler's movie career splits off onto a separate track. It was a huge story back then that Sandler was going to be doing a movie with Paul Thomas Anderson, then coming off the nearly unmatched pair of Boogie Nights and Magnolia.
At this point Sandler was still probably the #1 comedic movie star we had. He had tossed out a couple semi-clunkers like Little Nicky but his batting average on comedies was still very high.
I didn't know what to make of this thing. What a curious little oddity of a movie. Anderson's previous 2 films were these big, spawling epics with tons of characters and long runtimes, and here is this 90 minute movie about a guy who works out of a warehouse and who has a bunch of terrible sisters and who runs afoul of a phone sex scam and who buys a lot of pudding. But he also finds love with Emily Watson in a genuinely sweet romance.
The weirdness proves a perfect fit for Sandler, who always feels a little off-kilter anyway. He is prone to bursts of comic violence. His line deliveries always feel distinctively strange. In 2002 we didn't really know yet that Sandler could be a terrific actor in more serious stuff, but this split his career into two paths. After this point his comedic output slipped a lot. But his stabs at dramas or at least dramedies proved to be quite consistently good, culminating a few years ago with the brilliant Uncut Gems.
This film feels more essential to the Sandler story than the Anderson story. PTA displays all sorts of directing prowess here with wonderful camerawork and music and a sure hand with all the cast. But the film stands as a bit more of a throwaway in his canon between his early classics and then There Will Be Blood.
No actress made a more dazzling or dramatic breakthrough for me in the early 2000s than Alison Lohman. Out of nowhere she pops up as the star of this film White Oleander, which I didn't have on my radar at all until whenever I saw the trailer and saw her.
The movie follows a teenage girl whose mother (Michelle Pfeiffer) goes to prison for murdering her boyfriend, which throws her into the foster care system. And we follow Lohman into a series of foster situations. One foster mom (Robin Wright) is a Jesus freak. Another (Renee Zellweger) is a depressive. Another just uses foster care as a front for cheap labor. Yeah it ain't exactly an advertisement for foster care. And throughout the film she also sometimes visits her mom in prison.
The film is melodramatic as hell, and would possibly fall apart if not for Lohman, who is incredible in this thing. She underplays the whole thing and is completely sympathetic. And she is so damn pretty, even as her look changes throughout the film. It's no wonder she was instantly one of my favorite actresses at that point.
Holmes by this point had spent her Dawson's Creek hiatuses wisely, carving out an excellent filmography for herself, largely by being a supporting piece in great films (Go, The Gift, Wonder Boys). Abandon was her first movie as a lead in 3 years, and her first outside of the high school genre.
Much was made that this film was the directing debut of Stephen Gaghan, the writer of films like Traffic. It's about a college student (Holmes) whose boyfriend goes missing. Benjamin Bratt plays the detective on the case. We have some early Zooey Deschanel, Gabrielle Union and Melanie Lynskey as some of the classmates.
The mystery of the boyfriend is never that compelling, as the thoroughly unmemorable Charlie Hunnam plays the boyfriend in flashbacks. Bratt is fine, but just that.
Katie is completely on fire in this though. A terrific performance where she manages to be tough and vulnerable and maybe a little unhinged. It's not a great movie, and fits in with her 98-05 run where her weakest movies were usually the ones where she had the lead. I'd say that was why her movie career stalled, but we all know that was because she got punished for marrying Tom Cruise.
2012:
The best picture winner at that year's Oscars, Argo cemented the comeback of Ben Affleck.
Based off the story of the Iranian hostage crisis, it stars Affleck as the man brought in to plan the rescue. The plan that was drawn up involved concocting a story in which the hostages were a film crew doing location scouting for a cheesy Star Wars ripoff called Argo.
Yes there is a lot of this film that got movie'd up. But the main story is real, and frankly the changes do not hurt the film. In particular the last act of the film makes things a lot more perilous moment to moment than they were in real life, but damn if that doesn't make for an incredibly visceral and tense finish. It's as nerve-wracking as any thriller in recent memory.
Affleck leads a very good ensemble of character actors, flanked by the flashier John Goodman and Alan Arkin as Hollywood players.
I was kind of surprised it went all the way and won Best Picture. The field wasn't that great, but I would have picked a couple over this.
Smashed should have been the movie that turned Mary Elizabeth Winstead into an A-list actress.
On the surface it could have been just another moralizing message movie about alcolohics. MEW is a kindergarten teacher who has a drinking problem. It's not a movie where we just watch her continue to drink and fuck up until at the very end having that moment that makes her want to change.
No, the moment she decides to stop drinking comes fairly early (it is a short film overall). And she is serious about it, no matter how much pushback she gets from her also alcoholic husband.
The movie has some heart and laughs too. It's not just a total downer. MEW is dazzling in this. She has a ton of charisma, and digs deep. She has one big breakdown scene near the end that, yeah, is meant to be THE scene but she gives me chills with how she acts it.
This movie kind of came under the radar and stayed there, getting strong reviews but not getting the kind of attention that leads to awards. Too bad, cause MEW gave hands down the best lead performance of any actress that year. She remains one of the most underrated actresses around to this day.
Other non-deep dive flicks:
1982:
-First Blood: The first Rambo movie. I watched all the older ones during theater shutdowns in 2020 and liked this the best by far.
1992:
-Glengarry Glen Ross: About as great a cast as you could find. Pacino, Jack Lemmon, Kevin Spacey (I know, I know), Ed Harris, Alan Arkin. That great Mamet dialogue. One of the better play adaptations.
-Under Siege: For sure one of the best movies Steven Seagal ever did. Kinda prefer the sequel.
-The Mighty Ducks: Is it okay if I say that I was never a huge fan of these movies? I mean, they're fine, but I'm not attached to them.
-Mr. Baseball: Tom Selleck as a ballplayer in Japan. I'm sure I watched this but have no memory of it.
-Of Mice and Men: I'm pretty sure I watched this movie in school. I read the book.
-A River Runs Through It: Never saw this, but it was one of Brad Pitt's first starring roles.
-Candyman: The original. I know I saw this, but it didn't stick in my memory.
-Consenting Adults: I know I saw this movie, cause I have a memory of my mom questioning me renting a movie with that title. It's not that sleazy, just a thriller.
-1492: They made a couple Columbus movies that year that bombed.
2002:
-Red Dragon: The Hannibal Lecter prequel directed by Brett Ratner of all people.
-Brown Sugar: One of those black romcoms that were usually a decent watch and tended to star the ageless Sanaa Lathan.
-The Transporter: Solid early Jason Statham action vehicle.
-Real Women Have Curves: The first appearance of America Ferrera.
-Frida: Salma Hayek got an Oscar nomination for this.
-The Truth About Charlie: Some sort of caper remake that starred Mark Wahlberg.
-Auto Focus: Remember when Greg Kinnear occasionally got prestige movie roles?
-The Ring: The biggest of the American remakes of Asian horror movies. I never actually saw it.
2012:
-Seven Psychopaths: Martin McDonough's highly entertaining dark comedy about a collection of criminals. Top flight cast with Woody Harrelson, Sam Rockwell, Colin Farrell, and possibly the last great Christopher Walken performance.
-Taken 2: This time the wife got taken, to less entertaining effect.
-Cloud Atlas: The Wachowskis wildly ambitious and unfortunately impenetrable time-spanning epic.
-Alex Cross: For some reason they tried to reboot this franchise with Tyler Perry in the lead.
-The Oranges: Pretty enjoyable suburban shenanigans dramedy, most memorable for some peak level Leighton Meester hotness.
Coming in November...
Mercifully a few less films to get through (still won't finish this thing til November 30th, as is custom).
A few notable films turn 10.
8 Mile turns 20, so I'll have some thoughts about the poor judging of the finale.
And both Malcolm X and Home Alone 2 turn 20. What a double feature.
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