Cinematic Throwbacks: March 1996/2006/2016

1996:

The 90s was a golden age of movies made in Minnesota. My personal favorite is Beautiful Girls, but a movie being made here at the same time is pretty much the unquestioned most significant film of the era.

Fargo, written and directed by local boys Joel and Ethan Coen, is widely acclaimed as one of the best films of the decade.

Somehow, I didn't see this in theaters, at least not at the time (I did see a 25th anniversary screening). I have no idea how that happened. I knew the Coens. The movie got a lot of attention. Siskel and Ebert raved about it.

The very beginning of the movie says it's based on a true story. It's not, but that's the kind of thing you could still get away with in 1996. It's a whole complicated kidnapping plot, where William H. Macy hires a pair of crooks (Steve Buscemi, Peter Stormare) to kidnap his wife, to ransom money from his father in law. Everything goes haywire, and people die, and in comes police chief Frances McDormand to investigate. 

It took a bunch of viewings to really get into the plot. But the plot itself is kind of just incidental. It's the characters and the writing that make this a classic. 

The thick Minnesota accents are knowingly exaggerated. No, we don't all sound like that. But the characters really do feel like Minnesotans. 

McDormand doesn't even show up until the movie is almost half over, but she is so great that you always forget. It's an Oscar winning performance, where her aw shucks demeanor hides that she is actually sharp and intuitive.

Also nominated was Macy, as one of the weasely-ist weasels in movie history, a guy whose plan is utterly stupid (we never actually find out why he needs the money) and who catches exactly zero breaks on top of that.

Hard to not have this as my #1 Buscemi performance, either. Paired with the largely silent Stormare, Buscemi talks and talks and talks and is always hilarious, even when doing some awful stuff. 

All the little bit players in this are vivid, including one of my old college teachers, who plays Macy's boss at the car dealership. And Normandale College gets name dropped.

The Coens won the Oscar for best screenplay, richly deserved. In an age now where it seems like every movie is over 2 hours, it's insane to me that the Coens were able to make this thing in under 100 minutes. Fully fleshed out characters, a twisty plot, not a wasted scene in the film. Brilliant.

And this film will never not hold up. It just seems to get better and better over the years. You betcha. 

2006:

Sometimes, a movie might feel timely in the moment, only to prove to be ahead of its time. Such is the case with V For Vendetta.

Adapted from a cult comic, and shepherded to the big screen as the Wachowskis first big post-Matrix project, the film shows a futuristic England, under the rule of a fascist dictator of a chancellor (John Hurt). A masked vigilante known only as V (Hugo Weaving) is fighting underground against this regime and hoping to start a revolution a la Guy Fawkes, who the mask is modeled on.

So we don't have our own V in 2026 America (or do we?), but boy, does this material mimic our current reality. And to think when this came out in the spring of 2006, I already thought this was a prescient story about George Bush's America.

Turns out we hadn't seen anything yet, and in 2026, the film feels like a warning about what would happen under Trump. Not that we had any idea the rapist pedophile would be permanently in our lives a decade later, but the topics of media manipulation, and agents of the state going after citizens, by order of a vicious and cruel leader who maintains a cult following were right there. 

In 2006, the political allegories and current day parallels were not the draw. That would be its star, Natalie Portman, in her first post-Star Wars role. She plays Evie, a London citizen who, by happenstance, gets wrapped up in V's plan. This movie was the reason Natalie had a shaved head while doing Revenge of the Sith press, cause midway through the movie, her character gets her curly locks lopped. 

It was not surprising, of course, that Natalie still looked incredible bald. This was the era of my faves going bald, with Britney shaving her head the next year, and I forever maintain that it was a tragedy that we never got to see any of bald or even short hair Britney other than the famous stalkerazzi pics. Natalie did a couple of short hair movies after this. 

Okay, hair tangent over. Natalie is, of course, great in the movie and has a very engrossing chemistry with V, which at times does harken back to Mathilda and Leon. Weaving wasn't even originally cast, but his vocal performance alone feels irreplaceable.

It's a film with ideas, but it does also have some terrific fight scenes. V isn't exactly a superhero, but he has super skills. Just as a visual, V is incredibly cool. I have a V figure on my shelf.

The movie was directed by James McTeigue, not the Wachowskis (they wrote it), and it was his only noteworthy movie. It was a solid hit, and helped lead to Watchmen getting made. It also remains one of Natalie's biggest hits where she is the lead star. 

And if things continue in America as they are, the movie might as well become a documentary. 

In his long, legendary career, Spike Lee has done a lot of things, but only once has he ever gone the director for hire route.

Inside Man is firmly a genre film, that being the bank heist/hostage thriller, but this is where a director of Lee's caliber makes all the difference. His style is all over this thing. Ron Howard was the original director here, and, wow, this would not have been what it is. 

Denzel Washington is the detective, and he is in full movie star swagger mode. Clive Owen is the thief, and this was another great performance from him. Still baffled at his career fall off.  Jodie Foster is a mystery woman. The supporting cast is full of those colorful bit players that always populate Lee's films.

The film is non-linear, with Washington's interrogations of the hostages interspersed with the robbery. You can tell Lee is having fun just playing around with a mainstream movie. Not that Lee hasn't continued to have an iconic career, but I do wish he had dipped his toe into the "one for them" pool again.

2016:

Shared cinematic universes were all the rage in the 2010s. One of the more under the radar attempts at this was making a shared movie universe based off of the buzzy 2008 pov monster hit Cloverfield. 

Did we need one? Not really. Cloverfield is a good gimmick movie, but nothing in it had anybody clamoring for more stories.

So producer JJ Abrams, and pre-Predator franchise director Dan Trachtenberg brought forth less of a standard sequel or spinoff, but a movie whose central mystery was how it connected to Cloverfield at all.

10 Cloverfield Lane is actually a much better movie than its predecessor, and works just fine as a stand-alone thing. A woman (the dazzling Mary Elizabeth Winstead) gets in a car accident, and awakens chained to a bed in an underground bunker. The man who brought her down there is played by John Goodman, who owns the accompanying house. There is also another guy down there, played by John Gallagher.

But Goodman won't let MEW leave, because he says there has been an attack on the surface. It's all kept very vague. From the title, we could guess what has happened. But she doesn't believe it, and even after she pretty much does, there's the issue of whether or not she's safe in the bunker. 

Goodman may be right about the attack, but he still might be a dangerous person. The bulk of the movie is a building tension about how to survive IN the bunker, forget about the outside world.

The last 10 minutes or so give us the answers, and tease another movie that never happened. That part feels tacked on, but the majority of the film is really claustrophobic and compelling. Winstead and Goodman are fantastic.

The movie did well, but we never really did go much further with the Cloverfield cinematic universe. 

Writer-director Richard Linklater once gave us Dazed and Confused, the nearly perfect last day of high school movie, and probably the single best hangout movie ever made. It didn't matter that there wasn't much in the way of a standard plot. Just hanging out with these characters was the point.

And 10 years ago, he went to the well again, and gave us one of the best hangout movies of the 21st century.

Everybody Wants Some was promoted as a "spiritual sequel" to Dazed, and it has a lot of that same easygoing charm. And you can easily tell how it could just be a sequel, albeit with different actors.

Isn't Dazed's Mitch Kramer, a pitcher, an easy comp for this movie's nominal lead Jake (Blake Jenner), also a pitcher and just beginning college, in the early 80s (so timewise it matches up easily)? And it's a similar structure, such as it is, with the younger guy initiating into a collective of older guys. 

Linklater's eye for young talent suited him very well here again. Jenner had the talent, but screwed himself by apparently being a bad guy off the screen. But this movie helped launch Glen Powell, Wyatt Russell, and Zoey Deutch, as the movie's lone significant female character. Perhaps that's why this movie can't match Dazed, which had a bunch of standout women.

It's just a super fun hang, with fun characters, amusing dialogue, and great needle drops. It didn't make nearly the impact as Dazed, even as a cult movie, but it's a hidden gem, and I wish we got more of these. 

Other non-deep dive flicks...

1956:

-Forbidden Planet:

1986:

-The Money Pit: Tom Hanks and Shelley Long buy a house, and calamities ensue. The house shenanigans are much more entertaining than the marital strife. 

-Highlander: There can be only one...although they made a bunch of these. 

-Gung Ho: A Michael Keaton/Ron Howard movie set at an auto plant. I randomly watched this on cable a bunch as a kid. 

-Rad: A true bike racing classic, which I had never heard of until Rifftrax did it as a live show a couple of years ago. 

1996:

-Executive Decision: Kind of a second tier 90s action flick, this was basically Die Hard on a plane. Kurt Russell is the hero. Steven Seagal has a surprise early movie death. 

-Sgt. Bilko: A pretty funny Steve Martin comedy, based on the old show. 

-Ed: Matt LeBlanc plays baseball aside a chump. The 90s were wild. 

-The Birdcage: A big hit, and one I liked a lot too at the time, although I'm not sure how well it's aged. 

-Girl 6: The worst movie Spike Lee made in the 90s, a weird comedy about a phone sex worker. 

-Up Close and Personal: A dreadful newsroom romance with Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer. We did get a wonderful Celine Dion song out of it. 

-Down Periscope: Navy comedy with Kelsey Grammer trying to be a movie star. 

-Flirting With Disaster: The breakout film for director David O. Russell. 

-A Family Thing: Nice little dramedy with Robert Duvall and James Earl Jones finding out they are brothers  

-Race The Sun: Kids build a solar powered race car. Halle Berry is a teacher. One of the kids is young Eliza Dushku. 

2006:

-The Hills Have Eyes: One of the best of the horror remakes, an utterly brutal and bloody splatter fest. 

-Thank You For Smoking: Jason Reitman's debut film, a smart and mildly biting satire about a tobacco lobbyist (Aaron Eckhart in probably his best performance). Stacked as hell supporting cast, including Katie Holmes, in her last role before the Cruise era basically got her blacklisted. 

-Dave Chappelle's Block Party: Mostly a concert film about a show organized by peak popularity Chappelle. Great music, obviously, including a pre-insanity Kanye. 

-16 Blocks: Solid Bruce Willis thriller.

-Slither: Early James Gunn film that I absolutely hated at the time. 

-Stay Alive: Video game movie/slasher flick. I saw it cause it had Sophia Bush and Samaire Armstrong, two names that meant a lot to me in 2006. 

-She's The Man: Amanda Bynes dressed like a man. 

-Basic Instinct 2: No idea why they ever bothered to make this. It was very bad. 

2016:

-Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice: Well, this one was pretty infamous. No, it wasn't AS bad as its reputation, not as good as the Snyder cult said. I've seen it in parts on TV over the years and maintain that it is a pretty good Batman movie and a dreadful Superman movie. Wonder Woman pops in at the end to save things. There's another cut of the film that is supposedly better, but I've never seen it. 

-Zootopia: One of the more enjoyable non-Pixar animated movies of the last 20 years. 

-Allegiant: The last entry we got in the Divergent series. It was supposed to lead into a final 4th film, but this one didn't do that well, so that last film never came. I still think this was better than Insurgent.

-London Has Fallen: The inferior sequel to Olympus Has Fallen

-Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: Lame military comedy with Tina Fey and Margot Robbie. 

-The Bronze: A dark comedy about an Olympic gymnast (Melissa Rauch from Big Bang Theory) that wasn't as funny as I hoped. 

-Hello My Name Is Doris: Sally Field with one of her better late career roles as a frumpy office worker. 

-Midnight Special: Kind of disappointing alien drama from director Jeff Nichols. 

Coming in April...

The focus is on the film's turning 20, including Rian Johnson's breakthrough Brick, the hugely underrated Lucky Number Slevin, and United 93, one of the most riveting films ever made.