Cinematic Throwbacks: June 1975/1995/2005/2015

1975:

Alright, so this is the film that many would say was the start of the modern movie landscape.

You ever looked at old movie release schedules? I do it all the time for this blog, and it's wild to see the old time schedules. The summer was just barren as far as big movies go. What the hell did people do before this? Be outside, I guess. Crazy. 

Jaws changed things in a number of ways. The biggest thing was just how movies were released. In the old days, even the marquee films would get slow rollouts. They would get shown in a few big cities, then gradually make their way around the country. It could take a long time for things to get seen everywhere.

Not Jaws. Jaws got tons of marketing dollars behind its release, and came out in hundreds of theaters at once. Nowadays, every big movie gets easily 4,000 screens minimum. Back then, there really weren't even multiplexes either, so Jaws flooded the marketplace in a way that had never happened.

And it paid off historically. They made a fortune on this movie, so much that Jaws was for a time the highest grossing film ever. It's still top 10 all-time adjusted for inflation.

It also cemented the early career of a director named Steven Spielberg. You may have heard of him. He had only made a couple of things before this, but everything after would be an event.

So...is Jaws really that good?

I didn't see this movie for a very long time. It always evaded me as a kid. As my movie fandom grew, I still never watched it. I knew OF it, but only ever saw it in bits and was never that interested. I finally saw it in full during a theatrical re-release during the 2010s. Can't even recall what year. 

And yeah, you know, it's pretty good. I would be lying if I said that I agreed this was a masterpiece, or one of the greatest summer blockbusters. Spielberg directs it very well. It has some solid tension (feels weird to me that it terrified people into not swimming). When the men get on the boat to go hunt the shark, it's a lot of fun. But like it often is when I watch an older classic, I'm kind of left more nodding my head in appreciation than loving it. 

1995:

No question about it that the big, most anticipated movie of the summer of 1995 was the latest Batman movie, Batman Forever.

The first 2 Batman films were monsters in their respective summers. But this one had a couple of major changes. Out, following the backlash to some of the darker material in Batman Returns, was director Tim Burton. The studio wanted a lighter, more colorful movie, and brought in Joel Schumacher. 

And also out was Michael Keaton as Batman. He wasn't interested without Burton. In stepped Val Kilmer.

No matter. The villains had received most of the attention in the earlier movies anyway. This one brought in Tommy Lee Jones as Two Face (taking over for Billy Dee Williams), and the new red hot star Jim Carrey as the Riddler. That was the casting that really made people excited.

It proved that yet again, the villains were the real stars of a Batman movie. Of these original 4 movies, I always felt this was the weakest one just because I found Kilmer to be a real bore. The movie makes some stabs at getting at the tortured psychology of Bruce Wayne, but I never cared about that as presented here. Kilmer just wasn't interesting to watch.

Around him, we have that colorful, often bizarrely goofy movie the studio wanted. Lots more bright colors, and silly comedy. I do think that Schumacher got the balance better here than in the next one. 

It's also kind of a kinky Batman movie. The Nicole Kidman doctor character spends most of her scenes trying to fuck Batman. And hey, Kidman is still really hot here, so go for it. Drew Barrymore randomly pops up in sexy outfits a couple times. We get the debut of the bat nipple suit.

The movie is wildly over the top in design and performance. Carrey and Jones compete to see who can be most outlandish. Obviously Carrey is more suited to this, and his Riddler does manage to be both funny and threatening when necessary. 

The movie gets a little overstuffed when it introduces Robin, played by Chris O'Donnell in a bratty performance that I never really liked.

I still think this is my least favorite watch of the original 4, but it's fun. It's neat to look at, some of the action is fun, the music is great (killer soundtrack), and even though I don't think Kilmer ever really works here, Batman himself is the most layered yet. 

In 2025, the idea of a movie being distinctly American means something very different than it did in 1995. 30 years ago, we were bursting with optimism as a country, not just for where we were then and hopefully going, but nostalgic for the journey that got us to that period of peak national optimism.

A movie about how great and resilient and inventive we are would be laughable now when we are going backwards centuries with a cruel presidential administration enacting cruel policies. We even have one of the country's biggest villains launching rockets that explode half the time, and laughably talking about colonizing Mars.

Thank god Elon Musk was not in charge of NASA in 1970. The story of Apollo 13 would be about how a spaceship blew up and killed everybody. No survivors.

Instead, the story is about how a mishap on a planned trip to the moon turned into a gripping story about how a bunch of really smart people utilized all their intellect and problem solving skills to get 3 stranded astronauts home safely.

Ron Howard's Apollo 13, a dramatization of the ship's journey, was a perfect 4th of July period summer movie.

The film makes a handful of concessions to the demands of movie narrative, but largely sticks closely to the facts of what happened. Almost every discussion if the film eventually mentions how we.all knew the ending before we saw the film. But Howard's never better direction makes the film very suspenseful. That ending where they don't restore communications as quick as they're supposed to remains a hold your breath sequence. 

It was the next notch in the belt for Tom Hanks's incredible 90s run. He had just won his 2nd straight Oscar for Forrest Gump. And he anchors this fine ensemble, as Jim Lovell, the lead astronaut on what would be the doomed flight.

His fellow astronauts are Kevin Bacon and Bill Paxton. Gary Sinise is another astronaut who gets sidelined from the mission. Ed Harris is impeccable as the NASA commander. Kathleen Quinlan is strong and feisty as Hanks's wife. The latter two were both Oscar nominated. Hanks and Sinise would have also been very worthy. 

Apollo 13 was nominated for best picture, and I certainly think it should have won over Braveheart. I think there was a little backlash over the film being jingoistic. But I mean, those stories still worked then.

On a technical level the film is perfect. Howard utilized that "vomit comet" to show the zero gravity. The film does a great job of getting us non-intellectual folks to kind of understand a lot of the NASA jargon.

I really think this is the very best film Ron Howard has ever made. Oh, and fuck Elon Musk. 

2005:

We will probably never stop having Batman movies ever again, but prior to Batman Begins, we went almost a decade without one.

The follow-up to the previously reminisced Batman Forever, was the infamous Batman and Robin, a lambasted film that also did pretty poorly at the box office relative to expectations. There were plans to try another entry in that continuity (go Google Batman Triumphant), but that never happened, and the character lay dormant. 

And then came Christopher Nolan. This era was the golden age of filmmakers known for smaller films being picked to helm giant comic book franchises. Sam Raimi, Bryan Singer, Tim Story. Sure, now Nolan is a huge star unto himself, and known for giant, ambitious films.

But he got to make films like Inception and Oppenheimer because of what he did with the Batman character. Nolan got this franchise off of Memento and Insomnia, neither of which had anything comic booky about them, but were both great films made by a director who clearly just got it.

And given where Batman was as a movie franchise in the aftermath of B&R, Nolan stepped into a spot that carried with it relatively little pressure. He could try something wildly different from Schumacher or even Burton. I mean, all he really needed to accomplish with this film was deliver something that re-established credibility to the character, and for Nolan it would also help his career stay on its upward trajectory. 

Nobody expected that he would helm what is pretty much unquestionably the best fully contained movie trilogy of all time.

My own expectations for this were fairly mild. I was psyched to see Katie Holmes in a bigger movie, and I was definitely interested in the Nolan of it all. The cast was deep, too, but for all the acclaim he had already received for various films, I wasn't much of a Christian Bale fan.

I liked the film quite a bit when I first saw it. Nolan's darker, grittier aesthetic approach was fantastic and immersive. The story really went back to the beginning, opening long before Bruce Wayne dons a cape. I didn't quite know what to make of the long first act that shows him training with the League Of Shadows, under the tutelage of Liam Neeson. Some of this doesn't even fully pay off until the 3rd film, but Nolan is planting the seeds.

Once back at Gotham, we meet some of the characters we know (Michael Caine as Alfred, Gary Oldman as Gordon) and ones we don't (Holmes as Bruce's childhood friend Rachel, Morgan Freeman as Lucius Fox, basically Bruce's Q). And we meet villains played by Tom Wilkinson and Cilian Murphy. I honestly don't know if some of these exist in the comics (obviously Scarecrow--the planned villain in the B&R sequel--does). The casting is top tier. Holmes is great. I'm still so annoyed the tabloid attention she got from the Tom Cruise marriage cost her the sequel. Freeman is probably my next favorite. The "oh you wouldn't be interested in that" line reading is why you cast a legend. Oldman fits like a glove as a beacon of goodness, and that from.an actor probably best known at that point for villain roles. 

And Bale proves to be maybe the best actor ever at handling both the Bruce role and the Batman role at once. 

Nolan makes a film with real depth and feeling, giving us the 1st Batman film in which Batman is the most interesting character. But this isn't just some character study, and Nolan delivers cool action throughout. Add in the Hans Zimmer score and the whole thing feels like the exact Batman film we all always wanted. 

But I still only thought at the time that the film was good, not great. I wonder if I was just in a weird headspace that summer (I know who put me there 😠) cause even Revenge of the Sith I kind of underrated at the time. But also, this is a film that was absolutely made better by the films that followed. The groundwork being layed so well here gave us 2 and 3. We get the Joker tease at the end, and we all know where that went. 

Here's another film that I think arrived underappreciated and has aged very well. 

Steven Spielberg remaking the classic War Of The Worlds (a classic of its time) with Tom Cruise in the lead was about as sure of a thing as it gets. The pair had teamed up a few years earlier for the classic Minority Report. Both were still at the top of their game. 

And then it all got overshadowed by the infamous moment when Cruise jumped on Oprah's couch. This was when he started dating Katie Holmes, and look, if I had pulled 2005 Katie Holmes I'd have been jumping on couches, chairs, and any other piece of furniture in sight. I never thought of it as anything but silly, but it really put a stain on Cruise's career that lingered for a while. 

The film was still a pretty big hit though. Spielberg made a very faithful adaptation, not deviating too much from the source material but making it feel very much a modern story too. 

Earth is invaded by aliens, who begin wiping out cities, and incinerating people into dust with their death rays. But at the end they are killed by earth's own atmosphere. That's just like in the original, but with much grander fx work and scale. 

Cruise is an absentee father who has had his two kids dumped on him to look after just before the invasion starts. I'm not sure Cruise is that believable as the character, and frankly his kids are so annoying that I'd want distance from them too. Dakota Fanning is the daughter, who screams a lot, and Justin Chatwin (Jimmy Steve) is the son, who is a total dick and by far the worst part of the movie. The story stays focused on the 3 of them, not getting into anything on a global scale. 

Most everything from the beginning of the invasion until at least the sequence where Tim Robbins shows up as a crazy guy hiding underground is pretty great, and while there is comic relief, the film plays as almost a horror movie. It's pretty bleak a lot of the time.  The spectacle is tremendous, as Spielberg goes big with the destruction, and with top notch fx work.

I can't help but laugh at certain parts of the movie because of how well Scary Movie 4 parodied it. "We'll build our own tripods. They'll have FOUR legs!"

2015:

The 2010s had a real nice run of both high school movies, and sick high school kid movies. Their best overlap came in Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, one of the decade's unsung gems of any genre.

The hook then and now is that the dying girl is played by Olivia Cooke. Not sure I've sung her praises on the blog yet, cause she broke through with Bates Motel (which was still running in 2015) and has only achieved higher notoriety now with House of the Dragon. But she is a sublimely enchanting actress, and is one of my favorites, in part due to this film. 

She isn't the protagonist here, though. No, that would be Greg, played by Thomas Mann. Greg is a character clearly inspired by Ferris Bueller, in that he kind of gets along with everybody in school. But the spin is that Greg is actually like this as a defense mechanism, to make it through high school without causing any waves. He's not really actual friends with anyone except Earl (RJ Cyler), who he makes silly little films with.

Cooke is Rachel, one of those many classmates Greg sort of knows but isn't friends with. Then she gets diagnosed with leukemia, and Greg's mom pushes him into hanging out with her. 

There's no romance. There are actually jokes about how there isn't one. It's just a friendship story, fairly light on plot. The narration even diffuses some drama by saying that Rachel doesn't die.

Mann is fine. He plays the role well enough, with solid deadpan style. Cyler is even more deadpan. They got a nice collection of actors to play the adults. Who wouldn't love to have Jon Bernthal as a teacher?

But for me it's always been the Cooke show. She's divine in this, throwing out her own deadpan, but then really extracting every bit of pathos when the time comes. And when the overall film, which exists in that kind of sarcastic zone most of the way, starts to crack and let in the real feelings, it gets very sad.

Sadly this film wasn't much of a hit. But we need our underseen gems. 

I honestly do not understand why it has been so challenging to make good Jurassic movies. Sure you're never going to top the original, which is one of the most seamless, perfectly made summer blockbusters of all time, but these are dinosaurs in the modern world. Figure it out.

The Lost World remains one of the biggest movie disappointments of all time. Jurassic Park 3 made me as physically angry as any movie I have ever seen. And then the franchise was gone. It was over a decade before we got another crack at this. 

And because the franchise had both been such an integral part of people's youths, and had been gone a while, the next film brought in a new generation of audience, and stunningly, it became one of the biggest movies of all time.

Jurassic World made ALL the money. Like, top 5.all time global smash money. I don't think anybody saw that coming.

We do have a new Jurassic film coming out literally days after I hit publish on this blog, and I have some hopes for it, but as of now Jurassic World is by far the best film in the franchise since the original. It's the only one that delivers in ways the franchise should.

So, remember the failed park in the original? Well we're a couple decades later and they opened it after all. And it's thriving, drawing massive crowds. But of course things must go haywire, and they do, courtesy of a genetically engineered dinosaur called an Indominus Rex. It's like a T-Rex with a few extra upgrades.

Director Colin Trevorrow, hired off the clever little indie Safety Not Guaranteed, steers the proceedings well. The big set pieces are fun. The film has some grandeur and.also a sense of humor. The film follows the structure of the original a lot, but finds time for a few new ideas. 

Granted, it's just stock characters, but they do what they need to. Nobody is as engaging as the original holy trinity, but Chris Pratt is solid, and Bryce Dallas Howard is spunky.

I think the subsequent sequels have also retroactively made this look better. Fallen Kingdom and Dominion were so forgettable that I couldn't for sure say which had which plot.

Don't let us down, Scarlett. 

Other non-deep dive flicks...

1985:

-St. Elmo's Fire: The biggest Brat Pack film. All the suspects are there. 

1995:

-Judge Dredd: Okay, I stand by this one. Stallone's comic book adaptation was one of that year's most notorious bombs, but I liked it then and still do. Okay, he takes the helmet off. Boo hoo. The action, set design, and fx are all outstanding. Lots of overacting, but it's fun. 

-Congo: The talking gorilla adventure movie. 

-The Bridges of Madison County: Romance with Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep. Given their respective politics I imagine this would be rocky. 

2005:

-Mr. And Mrs. Smith: One of that summer's most hyped films, what with the Pitt and Jolie of it all. I didn't see it for years. I really think it's just okay. 

-Cinderella Man: A Ron Howard boxing drama starring Russell Crowe. It's a true story and well told, but so restrained and stately that it never really elevates. 

-The Perfect Man: Hilary Duff basically catfishes her mom. 

-The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants: 4 cute girls share pants that are good luck or something. 

-Lords of Dogtown: Kind of a highly anticipated film at the time, cause it was Catherine Hardwicke's 1st film since Thirteen, and Nikki Reed was in this. 

-Herbie: Fully Loaded: The beginning of the beginning of the end for Lindsay Lohan. 

2015:

-Inside Out: One of the best, most creative of all the Pixar movies. 

-Ted 2: A disappointing sequel that decided to be a weirdly serious courtroom drama for part of its runtime. 

-Spy: Melissa McCarthy becomes a spy. Get it, it's because she's fat. Ha ha ha. 

Coming in July...

Another loaded month (the summer always is).

Back To The Future turns 40.

A handful of notable 1995 flicks hit 30.

The first of the Fantastic Four movies turns 20.

And we got a few hitting 10 too. Busy busy busy.