Cinematic Throwbacks: May 1983/1993/2003/2013

1983:

You will get no argument from me that The Empire Strikes Back is the best film from the original Star Wars trilogy. But for my money Return Of The Jedi is pretty close.

As with episodes 4 and 5, I first really saw ROTJ during the special edition releases. I kind of wish I had been able to experience the original release for it. I'm sure that 3 years wait from the ESB cliffhanger was something else. Endgame-ish.

For me basically the only reason I still have this movie as my 2nd favorite of the OT is that that opening half hour is still pretty draggy. And the musical sequence was easily the worst special edition choice. But once the sail barge sequence hits we are off. RIP Jabba and Boba Fett (for a while). 

But what about the Ewoks? What about them? They are fine. Calm down. There's some amusing stuff with them. 

All of the Luke-Vader stuff in this film is fantastic. And it culminates in that amazing sequence aboard the new Death Star where Palpatine tries to turn Luke. We will pretend that The Rise Of Skywalker didn't retroactively ruin the ending.

The film ends so fantastically, with the Luke-Vader stuff, the assault on the Death Star (IT'S A TRAP), and the battle of Endor. 

We also get the Leia slave outfit, which proves Jabba is a freak. Carrie Fisher was deep in the drugs at this point, but she's still good in it. Always thought Harrison Ford kind of phoned it in on this one. 

I got to see this in theaters again for the anniversary, and it was the one with Vader saying "no" while Palpatine zaps Luke. I didn't even know this version existed. It didn't bother me. But after 1983 everything bothered Star Wars fans. 

1993:

Okay, you wanna talk about a film I was OBSESSED with in the 90s? Menace II Society is it.

I missed this one in theaters, but when I caught it on video it was instantly one of my favorites. The black film wave was in full swing by this point and Menace was positioned as the successor to Boyz N The Hood. 

Both films take place in South Central LA, but really that's where the similarities stop. Boyz is a coming of age film with a hopeful ending. Menace is just a dark movie. Sure it has comedic moments but it is mostly quite bleak and unrelenting.

Menace also has a much less sympathetic lead in Caine (Tyrin Turner), who as the film opens is just graduating high school. But no, college isn't in the cards. He's already about that criminal life, selling drugs and other stuff. And in the film's iconic opening scene, he is also an accessory to a murder committed by his friend O-Dog (Larenz Tate).

I actually think Turner is the weakest part of the film. It's telling that his career didn't really go anywhere from here, as opposed to Tate, or Jada Pinkett who is fantastic here. The film of course famously was supposed to also co-star Tupac, but he got fired from the film. Tbh I can't see him playing the character he was going to be. 

I hadn't watched this movie in some time prior to this rewatch, but I still instinctively knew every line of dialogue, every shot, every music cue. I watched it constantly back in the day, probably at least once a week. I even had a favorite outfit that I wore that kind of matched what Caine wears in one scene. I was a weird teenager. 

Menace has one of the very best soundtracks of the 90s too. Straight Up Menace by MC Eiht (who is in the film too) is easily in my top 10 favorite rap songs of all time. 

This was the debut for the Hughes Brothers, one of the all time debuts. They went on to make the excellent Dead Presidents, and many years later The Book Of Eli, and have done some solo stuff each. But I do think this film indicated a greater career ahead. At least they have this one absolute classic. 

I have infinite affection for Cliffhanger. This was one of my favorite memories from the summer of 1993. I went with a friend to see Last Action Hero, but after we got our tickets we decided to sneak in to the R rated Cliffhanger instead. What a great decision. 

Cliffhanger might be my favorite Sylvester Stallone movie. At the time, Stallone was kind of not on my radar in a big way. I had not watched any Rocky or Rambo movies by then. Not really sure if I had seen any of his other movies either. I might have actually watched one of the 2 comedy flops he had done preceding this which had his career kind of reeling. Cliffhanger was considered a major comeback. 

Directed by Renny Harlin, this movie was dubbed "Die Hard on a mountain" which is fair. But the setting is what sets this apart in a big way. This might be one of the best shot action movies of all time. I already dread the amount of fake looking CGI vistas the in-development reboot will have.

The realism is essential to the iconic opening sequence, where a little climbing outing turns deadly. It's as good a first ten minutes you're going to find. 

So a group of terrorists (led by a gloriously over the top John Lithgow) steal a bunch of money in a cool mid-air heist, but the money gets lost in the snowy mountains. Stallone and Michael Rooker are the two mountain rescue guys who get forced to help the bad guys find the money. Stallone escapes and teams up with the ever plucky Janine Turner to outwit the baddies.

In fine fashion, each bad guy gets their own showcase death scene. Nothing more brutal than Stallone impaling Leon on a stalagmite (or is it stalactite?). And we get a cool fight at the end between Stallone and Lithgow. And yes, it works even though there is no chance Lithgow could win that fight. 

Cliffhanger is definitely one of the best action movies of the 90s. 

2003:

The first X-Men movie was very good...for its time. But it's not one that has held up though the years on its own right. For that we gotta go to the sequel, X2.

X2 is one of the great comic book sequels of all time, a film that expands on its story perfectly.

X2 is the one movie amongst all of them that makes the character of William Stryker compelling. It helps to have Brian Cox in the role. Stryker is the main bad guy here, whose plan involves controlling mutants in order to gain the power to wipe out all the mutants.

Like Cliffhanger, X2 has an iconic opening sequence, with Nightcrawler's attack on the White House. Nightcrawler is one of several excellent new characters intoduced in this film, along with Pyro, and Lady Deathstrike. The latter gets a fantastic fight scene against Wolverine.

All the action in this movie really works. This siege on the Xavier School is great. 

X2 has one of the genre tropes that pretty much always works: when the good guys and bad guys have to team up against a common enemy. And Magneto is one of the most likable bad guys anyway.

All of the returning cast is excellent. Halle Berry got a screentime bump, which you do with recent Oscar winners. Famke Janssen gets the big "death" scene.

X2 remains way up on the list of the best pre-MCU comic book films. 

A rare Disney movie with major parental loss, Finding Nemo opens with a scary shark attack on a couple of fish and their eggs. Only the father and one egg remains. Time jump and the father, Marlin (top notch voice work by Albert Brooks) is about to send his son Nemo off to school. Marlin is one of those overbearing parents, moreso since Nemo is his only child and has a broken fin.

Circumstances cause Nemo to get lost, and Marlin spends the movie trying to find him. Hey that's where the title comes from!

This is the movie I usually cite as my favorite Pixar movie. I just really love this one. The animation is so crisp. It's very funny and sweet, and has a good adventure story with lots of memorable bit characters (the shark who is trying to not eat fish anymore, the surfer dude turtle). And while Ellen DeGeneres's Dory is a little annoying sometimes, I even like her.  

2013:

By now we're some 30 movies deep into the MCU. And only one has ever left me truly disappointed. That would be Iron Man 3. 

There was no reason to think that would happen. This was the first MCU movie after The Avengers. The excellent Shane Black had come onboard to write and direct, and with the star he had helped resurrect with Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. The trailers looked awesome. The idea of Tony Stark taking on a real world terrorist was ripe with potential. 

So what went wrong? Well, the big thing is that Iron Man is not Iron Man for a very large section of this movie. For some reason there was a trend during this time of having superhero characters not be superheroes in their movies. I get it's the point to have Tony rely on his intellect, but was that not the entire first act of Iron Man 1 already? And having Tony riddled with ptsd from what happened in The Avengers just doesn't work. 

And the other issue is what pissed most people off: The Mandarin. Now, the comics version was not going to fly in the modern day, but what they did instead was terrible. When Ben Kingsley is seen early in the movie he is very mysterious and threatening. Then we meet him for real and he is just an actor playing a role, and not a smart actor either, just a comic relief dope. This revelation deflates the whole movie.

Guy Pearce is the main bad guy ultimately, and I guess the real Mandarin??? Dumb. Pearce is adequate in this movie, but nothing memorable. And his other henchmen, primarily the annoying gum-chewing James Badge Dale, are useless characters. The movie also commits the major sin of wasting Rebecca Hall. And the fakeout Pepper death is annoying. 

I don't HATE this movie. It still has plenty of great Downey lines. I liked his patter with the kid. There are a couple of really outstanding set pieces. Cheadle gets some fun stuff to do.

I hadn't watched this movie in years. I probably won't again for years. 

It's okay. Something has to be the worst MCU movie. 

The 2009 Star Trek reboot is one of the great franchise reboots of all time. So what was JJ Abrams going to do as a follow up? 

Well, make maybe the most polarizing Star Trek movie of all time. Into Darkness, for my money, is a fantastic piece of entertainment. Just as energetic, fun, and well written as its predecessor.

This one pissed people off some for its marketing. Pre-MCU Benedict Cumberbatch was cast as the villain, and there was all this mystery surrounding the movie about whether or not he was playing Khan. As in Star Trek Wrath Of Khan. Of course he was, and he's good in it, just not as iconic as Ricardo Montalban. 

And then there was the way this film really went for it in mirroring Wrath Of Khan. At the climax we get the famous sacrifice moment, only this time it's Kirk getting the radiation poisoning, and dying across the glass from Spock. And Spock does the "KHAAAAAAAN" yell. I'm mixed on that. It's well staged in its own right, but cannot possibly have the emotional punch (Zachary Quinto sure tries). Plus, they revive Kirk within minutes of screen time. I wouldn't have bothered.

Still, really dig the movie. It's big, funny, the ensemble is fantastic (this reboot cast was a homerun) and despite the parallels to Wrath Of Khan there is still more than enough of an original spin on it so that it's its own film.

It also marked the last performance from Leonard Nimoy. 

This was the first entry in this franchise since Fast Five basically created the formula for the back half of the series. But 5 arrived with some sense of discovery to it. How would 6 top it?

Well, to most people it didn't. Most people don't think 6>5. I'm not even quite sure it is, but it's close. Either way Furious 6 is one of the best of the franchise. 

So this one had the hook that, somehow, Michelle Rodriguez's Letty is alive. Presumed dead in 4, she is now back and working with this film's bad guy Luke Evans. He is after a Macguffin that can do Macguffin-y things. So Dwayne Johnson has to go recruit Vin Diesel and his team to go after him. 

The group dynamic just always works. This is the last one with Gal Gadot (or is it?) and the last one that Paul Walker completed before he died. Walker gets a kind of superfluous side quest that allows for a couple cameos by previous franchise characters. 

The most noteworthy addition to the cast was Gina Carano. It's a shame she turned out to be a MAGA loon who destroyed her own career, cause she had a unique kind of screen presence. 

I liked everyone in this. The way they bring Rodriguez back and use the amnesia excuse is silly, but hey, it got us Rodriguez back. A worthy trade. 

They really use that increased budget. The sequence with the tank is a franchise high point. The finale with the plane on the endless runway is pretty epic. 

Other non-deep dive flicks:

1993:

-Hot Shots Part Deux: Not quite as brilliant a spoof as the original, but very, very funny. War...it's fantastic! 

-Dave: Kevin Kline is a presidential double who steps in to become the real president. I saw this in theaters. It's pretty well regarded. 

-Super Mario Bros: A notorious flop. 

-Made In America: This Whoopi Goldberg-Ted Danson comedy was pretty good actually. Nia Long was at peak cuteness, and this was Will Smith's first significant movie role. 

-Sliver: Ah yes, when an erotic thriller could be a big summer movie. This was no Basic Instinct though. 

2003:

-The Matrix Reloaded: The hype for this was through the roof. No way could this suck....except it did. A handful of cool action scenes drowned in a sea of pretentious philosophical bullshit. And a climactic 1-2 of the infamously awful "architect" scene and a stupid cliffhanger ending. One of my 5 most disappointing movies of all time. 

-Wrong Turn: Cool, gory horror movie with some peak era Eliza Dushku hotness. 

-Bruce Almighty: Jim Carrey becomes God. This was a pretty big hit, but it didn't do much for me. 

-The Lizzie McGuire Movie: No I did not see this in theaters. I did watch it eventually though, cause Hilary Duff was keeeyoot. 

-Daddy Day Care: The Eddie Murphy family movie train ran aground. 

-The Italian Job: Pretty good heist action movie with a kind of insane cast: Wahlberg, Norton, Theron, Statham

2013:

-The Great Gatsby: Baz Lurhmann's colorful adaptation with DiCaprio and a never more enticing Carey Mulligan. 

-The Hangover 3: The only reason this wasn't worse was that the previous sequel was even more unwatchable. 

-Before Midnight: The 3rd part of the Richard Linklater series that I have just never gotten into. 

-After Earth: The huge sci-fi bomb with Will Smith and his son and directed by a bottoming out M. Night Shyamalan. 

-Frances Ha: Really charming Greta Gerwig comedy. 

-Now You See Me: This magician movie had one of the dumbest twist endings of.all time, but was actually enough of a hit that they made a sequel that I never saw. 

Coming in June...

Mercifully not quite as many movies this month.

We do have the big 25th anniversary of one of the great teen movies of all time. 

Jurassic Park turns 30.

The excellent 28 Days Later turns 20.

A bunch turn 10, most notably This Is The End (one of the great 21st century comedies) and Man Of Steel.