Cinematic Throwbacks: June 1986/1996/2006

1986:

John Hughes owned the 1980s, with revered teen classics one after another. For me, his magnum opus, and best movie, is Ferris Bueller's Day Off. 

Like virtually every movie I liked prior to the 90s, I came to this movie through cable. I got into movie watching on cable around 1988, which would have been right around the time this was getting shown constantly. 

We all know the story. That rascal Ferris fakes sick to get out of school, and goes on an adventure in Chicago with his best friend Cameron and girlfriend Sloane. 

Whereas most of the Hughes movies at some point aim for some depth and sentiment, Ferris Bueller is just a great time. Hey, we're skipping school for this day, and we are going to have the most fun day imaginable. I suppose enough years have passed to admit that this movie absolutely inspired me to skip school on multiple occasions. Ferris fakes a fever. I think my go-to was a fake headache. I never had grand adventures like this. I did skip once with friends in senior year to go see the opening of the Star Wars special edition (I got busted for it).

The movie is aspirational. We all either wish we had a friend like Ferris or we wish we WERE Ferris. Ferris has boundless confidence and charisma. Most of us are much more like Cameron. And we all want a girl like Sloane.

I'm not sure I would have wanted to do all of these activities on a skip day, and I think logistically, it would be pretty impossible to do it all. I would have definitely done the trip to Wrigley.

As Ferris and Co. have their fun, we have the B plots of Ferris's moody sister (Jennifer Grey) trying to prove Ferris is faking, and the school principal (Jeffrey Jones, he of many 80s movies and a perverted dipshit irl) also trying to bust him.

The casting is great, down to the little bit parts, and the leads are nailed. Ferris could so easily slip into insufferability (as happened on the ill-fated TV spinoff), but Matthew Broderick is just too likable. Alan Ruck makes Cameron fully 3 dimensional. And Mia Sara is as dreamy as they come as Sloane. Definitely an early actress crush there.

I got to go see this in theaters a couple of months back, and it was a great time. This movie has its dated clothes and tech and all that, but the idea of skipping school and having fun with your friends will never go stale. 

1996:

Welcome back to the great movie summer of 1996.

June kicked off with The Rock, which for me is in the running for the best action movie of the entire decade.

The Rock checks every box. The premise is great, with a team of rogue soldiers taking hostages on Alcatraz Island, threatening to fire chemical weapons at San Francisco. Who can stop them? Only an old British spy and a chemical weapons specialist.

I was crazy excited for this movie. It was Michael Bay's follow-up to Bad Boys, and again, he was helming a Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer production, in this case the final one for Simpson, who died late in production. 

Bay cemented himself as an action movie god here, but the secret ingredient that took this movie into the upper echelon was the casting of Nicolas Cage. Trust me, in 1996, the idea of Cage being an action star felt crazy. Cage was coming off his Oscar win, and was known for quirky comedies and generally just being weird. But that same offbeat energy made a perfect match with this movie, and future ones as well. It's probably still my favorite performance of his. 

He's paired for most of the movie with Sean Connery, who is just as cool as a human being can be here. He gets a little less of the action here, but he is credible when he has to be. Arnold Schwarzenegger turned the role down, and I actually think an older Arnold could have been great in the role, but I can't picture anyone but Connery in this. Plus, you have the whole urban legend that his character could be James Bond. 

The 3rd star is Ed Harris, as the decorated soldier leading the bad guys. But Harris plays one of the best examples of a villain you sympathize with. He is doing what he is doing to get justice for forgotten soldiers. 

Very few action movies have characters as well written as this movie has. They're well written, the dialogue is great, with tons of terrific quotes (Quentin Tarantino did a little uncredited script work), and the performances are great. The cast is also flooded with tons of terrific character actors. Not a lot of gals in this, but Vanessa Marcil is cute as hell and charming as Cage's girlfriend.

The movie's action set pieces are all top of the line. The car chase could have been plucked out of the movie narratively, but then we wouldn't get to see Cage driving a Ferrari through a  store window. The whole 2nd half of the movie is a cat and mouse game on Alcatraz, and the movie does a fantastic job of utilizing all the different geographical locations. Throw in a ticking clock finale, and a superb Hans Zimmer score, and you've got it all.

The Rock was a huge hit, doing the most for Bay and Cage. It never gets old watching this. I even have the nostalgia of seeing this on the last day of school that year, one of so many great moviegoing experiences from that year. 

Jim Carrey burst to stardom like a neutron bomb in the 90s. Hit after hit. 

The first stumble he had was with The Cable Guy, for which he made headlines as the first actor to get $20 million in a movie. For some reason, actor salaries were big news back then. 

The Cable Guy has Carrey as, well, a cable guy, who becomes weirdly attached to one of his customers (Matthew Broderick). Things start harmless enough, but things go down a bit of a dark path for a comedy. This could easily be a full-on stalker thriller with just a couple tweaks. 

People weren't ready for this. The movie wasn't a failure, but it lacked the feel-good laughs of Carrey's other films to that point. It foretold Carrey's future as a star who wanted to branch out.

Ben Stiller directed this. Judd Apatow was a producer. The cast included early Owen Wilson and Jack Black (who I kinda hate in this). Needed a better love interest than the instantly annoying Leslie Mann. 

The movie did okay, but was destined for cult status. Obviously, it's pretty dated, but I think it has held up better than some Carrey movies that made more money. 

Arnold Schwarzenegger was the pretty much undisputed king of the action movie for over a decade. That era was bookended at the end by Eraser.

Eraser isn't talked about as one of his best, nor should it be. But it fits in as a rock solid 90s action film. Arnold works for the government witness protection program, helping witnesses by "erasing" their identities. 

His main mission in the film is to protect the Vanessa Williams character, who is helping blow the whistle on some weapons manufacturers. James Caan is his boss, whose villainy is not exactly hard to predict. 

The plot is nothing memorable, but the movie has some terrific action, and works as a thriller. We get a few more great Arnold one-liners. The entire sequence in the New York City zoo is worth it just to hear him spout "you're luggage" at an alligator he just shot.

This was the end of Arnold's prime. He wasn't the star of a satisfying action movie again for years, and his name on the poster was never again a guarantee of success or quality. 

Eddie Murphy, arguably the biggest movie star of the 1980s, did not have the same success in the 90s. He did some good movies, but nothing really hit at the box office.

Until he remade the old Jerry Lewis movie The Nutty Professor. This movie kickstarted Murphy's 2nd run of hits.

Murphy went all out, not just playing the rotund Professor Sherman Klump, but also all the adult members of his family, all under mountains of makeup and prosthetics (it won the Oscar). It was a throwback to Coming To America, and if you didn't know he played all these characters, you might not pick up on it. It's a tremendous showcase for his talents. 

Sherman's a scientist working on a weight loss drug. He winds up testing it on himself, and it turns him (temporarily) into the much skinnier Buddy Love, regular Murphy, and as over the top as Sherman is reserved.

There's a love interest, somewhat blandly played by Jada Pinkett. I really enjoy Larry Miller as Sherman's boss. Dave Chappelle plays an obnoxious stand-up comic. 

It's an enjoyable movie, but I didn't really think this was all that much better than a lot of Murphy's movies leading up to this. This movie was way too reliant on fart jokes and fat jokes. It's the genuine moments that shine through most. 

The movie was easily Murphy's biggest hit in nearly a decade, and he parlayed that into a run of more family-friendly hits, including a Nutty sequel that was arguably funnier. 

2006:

Well, here we are in 2026, with a new Superman franchise just a year old, the latest attempt to establish a 21st-century Superman. The first stab at this was made 20 years ago.

There had been attempts at doing Superman movies post-Christopher Reeve, most famously the Tim Burton/Kevin Smith/Nicolas Cage iteration. But once the 2000s comic book movie boom was fully rolling, you knew arguably the most famous character would return.

This film was helmed by a veteran of the genre, Bryan Singer, who left last month's X-Men: The Last Stand to do this. Superman would be played by newcomer Brandon Routh. Kevin Spacey is Lex Luthor. Kate Bosworth is Lois Lane. The story would even serve as not a full reboot, but as a sequel to Superman 2, ignoring the justly maligned 3 and 4.

So why did Superman Returns only end up being a one-off? Well, first the good. Routh was a great casting, evoking the old-fashioned do-gooder stoicism of Reeve. Spacey is a bad guy, but as a villain, that fits. Bosworth, who has kept acting, but might have become a bigger deal if this became a real franchise, is a terrific Lois.

But the way the film is done, it's not involving. It's like an okay cover version of a much better song. I loved hearing the classic John Williams score open the movie, but the movie needed to be more than just nostalgia. The action was fine, but indistinctive. And Lex's plan in the movie has to be one of the worst schemes ever concocted.

The movie did fine, but cost a ton. They did plan to make a sequel, but various stops and starts happened, and it never worked out. Routh deserved better, for sure. And then it was a new Superman reboot with Henry Cavill, and now we have a 3rd 21st century Superman franchise. 

Other non-deep dive flicks...

1976:

-Silent Movie: Mel Brooks (happy 100th!) spoofs silent films. One of his lesser known movies. 

-The Omen: The demon child movie. I never saw it. 

-Logan's Run: Pretty cool 70s sci-fi flick that influenced many, many films over the decades since. 

1986:

-Space Camp: I believe this was the first live action movie I ever saw in a theater. It was part of a birthday party.

-Karate Kid Part 2: I always felt this was the worst of the originals. 

-Raw Deal: Kind of a forgettable early Schwarzenegger flick. 

-Back To School: Rodney Dangerfield goes, well, guess.

-Running Scared: Solid buddy action movie with Billy Crystal. 

-Ruthless People: This was a hit comedy that I haven't seen. It's the only non-spoof ZAZ movie. 

-Labyrinth: Haven't seen this either, a Jim Henson creature feature that was, I believe, Jennifer Connelly's debut. 

1996:

-The Phantom: One of the failed attempts at launching a comic book franchise, this one starring Billy Zane.

-Striptease: Demi Moore got paid a lot of money to take her clothes off in this lame comedy. 

-Stealing Beauty: First starring role for Liv Tyler, and I believe it was my first sighting of Rachel Weisz.

2006:

-Click: For me, this marked the end of Adam Sandler's run as a reliable comedy star. This is the one where he gets a magic remote control that he can use to basically do anything. It spins off into a Christmas Carol-esque story with some hit and miss sentiment. But it's very funny at times, and the last time he did one of "his" comedies that delivered. (Funny People is an Apatow thing)

-The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift: Nobody in the world thought this franchise was anything but washed up after this movie. 

-Waist Deep: Solid action movie with Tyrese Gibson and the jaw-dropping Meagan Good. 

-The Breakup: This Jennifer Aniston-Vince Vaughn "comedy" was a big hit, but I found it dreary and unpleasant. 

-The Omen: The demon child remake. I did see this one on a first date, with a girl who turned out to be her own kind of demon. 

-Cars: The sequels did nothing for me, but the original was pretty fun. 

-Nacho Libre: The director's follow-up to Napoleon Dynamite, with Jack Black as a wrestler. I never saw it.

-A Prairie Home Companion: Robert Altman's final film, an adaptation of the Garrison Keillor play. Great cast.

-The Lake House: Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves re-united for this sappy romance.

-The Devil Wears Prada: A big hit movie, but I kind of hated it. I rewatched it ahead of the sequel just to see if anything changed, and no. I still find it largely a mean, shallow movie that champions superficiality. 

2016:

-Finding Dory: A decent sequel to the great Finding Nemo, but Dory is a character where a little goes a long way. 

-Popstar: In the running for the funniest movie of the last 10 years. Lonely Island's mockumentary about a dim-witted pop star played by Andy Samberg, a sly mix of Bieber, Adam Levine, Macklemore, and Timberdouche (who sadly cameos). Incredibly funny movie with great songs. A total bomb, which makes me sick. 

-Independence Day: Resurgence: I wouldn't say this long-awaited sequel to one of the 90s signature blockbusters is one of the worst sequels of all time, but out of the theater I felt like no sequel had ever felt less like the film that preceded it. It has a few cool set pieces, but you really miss Will Smith (trying to replace him with the charisma vacuum that was Jesse Usher is an all-time bad casting) and it basically ruins entire characters from the original. None of the new actors made any impact. It just abandons the somewhat grounded approach of the original and just wants to be futuristic spaceships firing lasers at aliens. It sequel baits, too. It never happened, cause this film flopped. Too bad. 

-Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows: The 2nd and last of the Michael Bay produced reboot. 

-Warcraft: The big screen version of the video game kind of flopped. I did think it laid the groundwork for what could have been a decent franchise.

-The Conjuring 2: Didn't like the original. Didn't see the sequel.

-Now You See Me 2: Didn't like the original. Didn't see the sequel. 

-Central Intelligence: Dwayne Johnson and Kevin Hart in a spy comedy that delivered exactly the middling amount of entertainment value as expected. 

-The Shallows: Blake Lively is terrorized by a shark. 

-Free State Of Jones: Matthew McConaughey in a weird Civil War drama with serious white savior vibes. 

-The Neon Demon: Nicholas Winding Refn's artsy indie with Elle Fanning as a model. 

-Swiss Army Man: Daniel Radcliffe as a farting corpse. Movies were weird then. It was directed by the Daniels, whose next film was Everything Eveywhere All At Once. 

Coming in July...

Independence Day turns 30...although I already did that write-up. 

Clerks 2 turns 20. Got some other stuff. You know how we do it.