Cinematic Throwbacks: October 1995/2015

1995:

Good old Eden Prairie Mall. About ten minutes from where I live. A frequent stop of mine in the early 90s, for movies (they had two theaters, one on each end of the mall) and sometimes for Sam Goody trips. I still go to that mall now, but it has been completely remodeled some time ago, its original form preserved in cinematic form in Mallrats. 

When I first heard about this movie being made here, it meant nothing to me. Who cares about some Shannen Doherty movie set in a mall?

But then, a few months before the movie came out, I saw a little movie called Clerks. Kevin Smith's debut was one of my formative movies, an instant favorite, which it remains to this day. So now Mallrats was going to be a big deal. 

For some reason, I did not see Mallrats at Eden Prairie. I assume it showed there. 

Having followed Smith for so long, I am very familiar with the lifespan of Mallrats. Despite being a low-budget movie with no major stars (or none who were stars yet), there was some expectation that this thing was going to be a big hit. Then it absolutely flopped, and was savaged by critics. Smith himself has never shied away from self-mocking his own failure.

But of course, Mallrats is not REALLY a failure. It quickly became a cult favorite, and I'm sure it has long since become profitable.

Mallrats lacks the occasional depth that Clerks and Chasing Amy have, so I've always had it a notch down from those two. But pound for pound, Mallrats may be Smith's funniest movie. 

It's his raunchy 80s comedy. A rambling, silly, barely plotted 100 minutes of pure Smith.

T.S. (Jeremy London) and Brodie (Jason Lee in his movie debut) have both just been dumped by their respective girlfriends (Claire Forlani's Brandi and Doherty's Renee).  So they go to the mall. 

Various misadventures ensue. We get the return of Jay and Silent Bob. Ben Affleck plays the heavy, the jerk from Fashionable Male. T.S. clashes with Brandi's disapproving dad (Michael Rooker), who is setting up a dating show to film at the mall that day, which figures into the climax. Stan Lee pops up for the cameo he was prepping for on the train in Captain Marvel.

The star of this thing is Jason Lee in seriously one of my favorite comedic performances in any movie ever. The guy is just on fire in every scene, rattling off every line of dialogue for maximum funny. He went on to do a few more Smith movies and a bunch of other stuff, but I'm surprised he was never one of THE comedy stars.

Even for being a deliberately silly comedy, Smith still wrote the hell out of this thing. I think he started to lose his way when he started writing dumb. Mallrats is very witty and articulate in its comedy, even if it's discussing the fine art of stink palming. It's what makes his early stuff so endlessly quotable, and you can bet Mallrats was among me and my friends most quoted movies in high school.

Smith is never one to shy away from going back to the well, and at various points over the years there has been talk of some sort of sequel. So far it's just the handful of characters that popped up in other movies, but I'd love another slice of Mallrats. 

The Hughes Brothers debut film Menace II Society was one of my favorite movies of all time at the time, and it still holds up very well. It was definitely going to be a hard one to follow up.

Sometimes, filmmakers try to keep it simple on their follow-ups. Sometimes, filmmakers cash in on their newfound clout and decide to go big. That second track is what the Hughes Brothers chose.

Dead Presidents is a big, sprawling, borderline epic, spanning years and several storylines that could probably carry a whole movie by themselves. 

The brothers brought back Larenz Tate from Menace as the lead character Anthony, a kid from the Bronx who opts to join the Marines and goodnight in Vietnam. Then he returns home and finds it hard to maintain work to support his wife and child, before masterminding an armored truck robbery. 

It's a LOT of plot, and the film's biggest flaw is that it is so overstuffed that some story threads feel underdeveloped, particularly Anthony's relationship with his wife, who just vanishes from the story in the last third.

The best parts of the film veer more into action. The Vietnam sequences are visceral and exceptionally violent. And the robbery sequence is extremely well staged, and unique in how messy it is. The marketing (including that poster) really leaned into the robbery, even though that's only the very last part of the film. 

The cast is across the board excellent. Tate had a run in the 90s for sure, but should have been a bigger movie star. Chris Tucker, fresh off of Friday, is very good in a more serious role. This is one of my favorite Keith David performances. Terrence Howard has his 1st major role. 

The soundtrack is a terrific collection of classics. The production itself is very authentic. It's not a perfect film, but it is never less than compelling stuff. 

John Travolta's Pulp Fiction comeback was cemented a year later with Get Shorty, one of the best movies ever about the movie business.

Travolta is a mob loan shark named Chili Palmer, who comes to Hollywood to track down a guy who scammed his way into some big money. But then he just winds up staying and getting involved in the movie business. 

Based on an Elmore Leonard book, whose work would later turn into other classics Jackie Brown and Out Of Sight, this film is the kind of snappy, light-hearted crime caper they don't make anymore. Get Shorty has crime plotlines, and some violence, but it's humorous. It's consistently light on its feet, and the key is in Travolta's joyful performance. That twinkle in his eye is such fun. I would put this performance at the very top of my Travolta pecking order. 

And he is surrounded by one of the most loaded casts of the decade. Gene Hackman is the shlocky director hoping to get his big break. Danny DeVito as the full of himself movie star. Rene Russo is the struggling actress. Delroy Lindo, Dennis Farina, and James Gandolfini as assorted adversaries. The film is expertly cast down to the smallest roles. And everyone is in the spirit of being a little goofy. 

This was a pretty big hit, especially for fall (in 1995, hit movies rarely came out in October). They tried to recapture this a decade later with the sequel Be Cool, but it just didn't work. That glint was out of Travolta by then. 

2015:

Elder statesman Ridley Scott has never slowed down, doing big movies on a near-yearly basis into old age. But it looks like his last truly great film will wind up being The Martian, a classic crowdpleaser.

A team of astronauts are on a mission on the surface of Mars. A big storm hits (yeah, they don't really have those on Mars...just go with it), and they have to abort and return to space. But in all the chaos, Mark Watney (Matt Damon) is abandoned on the red planet, and presumed dead.

But it would be a very short, unsatisfying film if he were dead. No, he's alive. And now he has to somehow figure out how to survive long enough to be rescued.

Could be the setup for a horror film, or an existential drama of some kind. Nope. The Martian is largely an upbeat, rollicking good time. It was mocked for being nominated at the Golden Globes in the musical/comedy category, but this kind of is a comedy.

This is primarily the Matt Damon show, and these kind of lone man settings do tend to draw out some great work from actors (think Tom Hanks in Cast Away or Will Smith in I Am Legend). There's a narrative device where Damon is doing these video logs during the isolation, and it allows him to get out the exposition and even be pretty damn funny. I wouldn't classify The Martian as a comedy, but Damon does give at times an extremely funny performance.

He's got a whole little research facility at his disposal, and it's really compelling watching him figure out how to use the limited tools at his disposal to survive. I'm not going to say everything here is 100% scientifically accurate, but it feels legit. And the film is set in a near future where we have at least advanced enough for a manned Mars mission. 

Great as Damon is, though, what elevates the film higher is that it isn't just him. The film has one of the most insanely stacked supporting casts in history. There are people working on the ground at NASA, other scientists, and the fellow astronauts. I'm not IMDB, so I'm not going to list everybody, but a couple of the best of them are Jessica Chastain, Jeff Daniels, Sean Bean, and Chiwetel Ejiofor. 

Eventually, Damon is able to communicate back home, and the last 2/3 of the film involves everybody collaborating to figure out how to keep him alive and then rescue him. It's again tremendously entertaining stuff, and has an almost hokey optimism that movies involving space rarely do.

Before Brie Larson became the most ludicrously overhated actress on the planet, she had spent years cutting her teeth on acclaimed indies and small roles in bigger films. And then with Room, she ascended to star, and won her richly deserved Oscar.

"Room" is the backyard shed Larson's character is kept in, along with her young son Jack (Jacob Tremblay), put there by a man who years ago abducted her, and who is also the father of the child.

This awful situation is not even known to Jack, cause mom has spent his childhood doing everything to raise him as if all of this is just normal life. It's well into the film that we even learn what's really happening here (although I recall knowing it going in).

The film works as a psychological thriller, and then as heartbreaking drama. They do get out of room, in itself a very tense sequence, but then there is the aftermath of the whole ordeal. That takes up the back half of the film, and while Jack seems to adjust quite well to the outside world he never even though existed, Brie's character is traumatized. And since she did such a great job of shielding the reality from Jack, he can't even understand what's wrong. 

It's a very sad film, but it does have a moving ending, where mother and son appear fully ready to move on. Larson's Oscar win was richly deserved, as she spends the whole movie in emotional turmoil that's usually being concealed. Tremblay probably should have won, too, for one of the most natural performances by a child actor ever. 

Other non-deep dive flicks...

1985:

-Commando: Just watched this for the first time within the last year or two. Very enjoyable early Schwarzenegger flick, and probably the first to take advantage of his gift for humor. 

1995:

-Strange Days: Produced by James Cameron, and directed by his then wife Kathryn Bigelow, this futuristic sci-fi flick (set on New Year's Eve 1999) is centered on a tech that lets users experience real things POV style. The world building is better than the kind of routine crime plot. Ralph Fiennes and Angela Bassett, both still fail new stars at the time, are both super charismatic. 

-To Die For: Nicole Kidman is a woman obsessed with becoming a TV news star, and will kill if necessary. I was still on board with Kidman at this point, and this was her best performance. 

-Assassins: Sylvester Stallone and Antonio Banderas as dueling assassins. 

-Mighty Aphrodite: I think this was my 1st Woody Allen movie, and one of my favorites. Mira Sorvino won the Oscar. 

-Vampire In Brooklyn: A weird Eddie Murphy misfire, as he teamed up with Wes Craven for a horror comedy that didn't really work on either count. 

-Copycat: Fall 1995's other serial killer movie, this one with Sigourney Weaver and Holly Hunter trying to catch a killer. 

-The Scarlet Letter: Notorious Demi Moore bomb. 

-Jade: One of those mid-90s erotic crime thrillers in the wake of Basic Instinct. 

-Leaving Las Vegas: Nicolas Cage won his Oscar as a spiraling alcoholic. 

-Never Talk To Strangers: Another silly crime thriller, with Antonio Banderas again, and Rebecca Demornay. 

-Now and Then: A little early Christina Ricci. 

2005:

-Waiting: Really funny workplace comedy set at a chain restaurant and headed by Ryan Reynolds and Anna Faris. 

-North Country: Charlize Theron had already won her Oscar, but she could have won another from this true story (set in Minnesota) about a woman suing over sexual harassment. 

-Domino: Had high hopes for this Tony Scott flick with Keira Knightley as a bounty hunter. It was a big disappointment. 

-Elizabethtown: Average Cameron Crowe movie, but it did kind of inspire my 1st road trip. 

-The Weather Man: Nicolas Cage comedy that, tbh I barely remember. 

-Shopgirl: Steve Martin starring/written by romance. 

-Saw 2: Probably the oddest first date movie I've ever gone to. 

-Doom: Very bad video game movie with The Rock. 

2015:

-Bridge of Spies: Solid Spielberg movie with Tom Hanks, and Oscar winner Mark Rylance (should have been Stallone). 

-Crimson Peak: Guillermo Del Toro's very stylish haunted house movie. 

-Pan: A big budget Peter Pan prequel that bombed and deservedly so. 

-Our Brand Is Crisis: A Sandra Bullock misfire, about political campaign managers  

-Steve Jobs: There were 2 movies about him around this time. This one had the much higher pedigree, with Danny Boyle directing an Aaron Sorkin screenplay. 

-Knock Knock: Keanu Reeves is just a family man minding his own, when two women (one of them Ana de Armas in I think her 1st english language role) show up at his door. This is a pretty dark, twisted movie, but entertaining. 

-Freeheld: I think this was the last Ellen Page movie that hit theaters before a whole lot of changes. 

-The Last Witch Hunter: A silly Vin Diesel action movie. 

-Bone Tomahawk: Extremely gruesome action movie with Kurt Russell.

Man, I really did have trouble remembering much about some of the movies from that month, even though I saw many in theaters. 

Coming in November...

Rocky 4 turns 40. Toy Story turns 30. Arguably my favorite movie musical of all time, Rent, turns 20. And Creed turns 10. Plus, other assorted goodies.