A Journey Through My Collection: The 1990's

The 1990's were my formative years of movie watching. I loved going to the local video store, often taking advantage of the "Seven Movies, Seven Days, Ten Dollars" deal they would have on the movies that were not new releases. We would see almost everything that came out, the whole family would hang out for a movie almost every Friday night, and yet there are a good number of the '90's movies that became favorites of mine that I didn't get around to until as late as the 2010's. It was a time where there were movies that EVERYONE saw in the theater, I recall the hype for Independence Day was so heightened that they pushed the release day up from the 4th of July to the 2nd to get more viewings. Prestige movies were great, Indie Films exploded and introduced a new generation of directors rivaling the storied '70's. Disney took over the world again and James Cameron made all of the money in the world. There was junk that came out of the decade, but when a '90's movie was great, it was timeless. ]

Miller’s Crossing (1990)

I think fifteen years of a couple of rewatches of this as well as The Godfather has led me to appreciate this in comparison and as a gangster movie in general. And I think that ultimately, I would take this movie over Godfathers 1&2, and not because I don't appreciate those movies. This is just so good at setting up the web of antagonists and making it look damn beautiful. The tommy gun sequence is a perfect set piece of the fire starting, the gunmen entering the room, returning fire, taking a tommy gun, escaping through the window and a barrage of bullets as the gunmen speed away. It gives a taste of the masterful set-pieces of No Country for Old Men, something that the Coens seem to do better and with more precision than anyone else in the world. The final release of violence is after the fact in a way reminiscent of Taxi Driver, but the funeral through the trees reminds of the ending of The Third Man. This is a movie that knows where it comes from and executes with perfection.

Barton Fink (1991)

Every shot really looks like an oil painting to the point that they let the camera linger to take in the color palate and composition. This high art cinematography reminds me of Portrait of a Lady on Fire that similarly takes full advantage of light, color and composition. The writer struggling in a murder hotel makes this a fitting cousin to The Shining. It's almost as if it's hotel driving Barton crazy, although it's more likely the people of L.A. have made him lose it much like the lack of people at the Overlook is what breaks Jack Torrance. While this is definitely a very good drama, maybe even a horror film, it is written so well that it can also be seen purely as a comedy. Hell, Jiminy Glick referenced the resonating bell in the empty lobby in the movie version of the character, comically ringing out in the emptiness for much longer than the acoustics should allow. It's eerie, but it's also funny.

Reservoir Dogs (1992)

This is still such a well made debut feature film. No one does the late reveal flashback better than Tarantino, and it's something he has gone back to a couple of times in his career. This is so well shot and 95% of the movie is amazingly written. I have never been a fan of the sequence where Tim Roth practices and recites his story to endear him to the gang, it's not that interesting of a story, practicing makes it seem more fabricated, but it is a necessary piece to the device to the purpose of the flashback. On rewatches over the years, it's amazing how fresh this still feels in a number of ways. It does very much live in the '90's in a way that I enjoy, but the look, the dialogue and the economy of storytelling are timeless.

The Three Colours Trilogy (1993-1994)

Blue

Aside from the Three Colours films, I don't know the works of Krzysztof Kieslowski very well. It seems that like Tarantino, he also had a sense of connecting his films, even if it's slight, I believe Kieslowski has at least two major trilogies and Decalogue, which has ten installments. It's fun that apparently the '90's popularized auteurs connecting their movies in "universes" and not necessarily in cash grab sequels with roman numerals suffixes. Blue, the first installment in this trilogy, establishes the fascinating style choice to not just use colored lights or filters, but to just happen to have blue objects and wardrobe to inhabit the color. The story is pretty good, dark subject matter with light aspects to it and a heart.

White

I really like how this connects to Blue with a glimpse at Juliette Binoche in the court room. Her story is quite a downer, losing her husband and child in an accident, but the story of the divorced hair stylist losing his wife, job, money and passport is so damn pathetic. The image that will always stick with me is him getting into the suitcase to travel. It's almost a cartoonish tragedy. He really is the weak link to Kieslowski's Three Colours' Avengers. It really feels like the biggest stretch of the three movies, but still packs so much into the storytelling that the main character Huck Finn's the end of his film.

Red

The payoff of The Three Colours trilogy is so unexpected and so dramatic. We are given a glimpse at a disaster and a story of survival, but the audience is given just enough to fill in the gaps of our own imagination to picture what happened. Funny enough, a viewing public that has seen Titanic has a visual reference of the sinking ship, yet Titanic would not be released for a few more years. This film is stunning. As the most striking color of the trio, red pops off the screen, but the camera also moves in some of the most dynamic sequences in film history with the cable sequence as well as the crane move in the theater that swoops from high above to be far below the actors. This gives a preview of Amelie's relationship with her fragile neighbor, again, a few years before that film was released. This is a perfect culmination of this colorful shared universe.

Dead Man (1995)

I don't think it's a tough decision to say that this is my favorite movie, and yet I hadn't even heard of it until I took a film studies class in the early 2000's where this was screened and I instantly fell in love. It's odd that this didn't hit my radar for so long because the movies of 1995 were one of the biggest years for video rental store movies, and I had thought I had seen everything. It was a year loaded with great movies, but also movies that were considered great at the time but didn't age all that well. Dead Man wasnt even the most well known western that was shot in Old Tucson from 1995. That would be The Quick and The Dead, which also holds up to be great fun almost thirty years later. 

Dead Man is amazing. The cast is amazing, Gary Farmer was the least known actor at the time and he comes out looking like a fucking action hero. I know that some people really hate the Neil Young score, but I absolutely love the sound and it is so carefully integrated with the important sound design of the film. This is absolute Western Heaven. Even if it's supposed to be a trip through hell.

Bottle Rocket (1996)

It really is Dumb and Dumber with a plot... and fuller characters... and actually more jokes... and a good soundtrack, writing, direction and an up and coming cast. It isn't quite as fully formed as Reservoir Dogs as a debut, but Wes Anderson really had a lot of his style, directing, writing and musical selections, already figured out. There are oddities in the writing, and great twists and turns in jokes that feels unique.

Titanic (1997)

I avoided this movie for decades. Although I loved Terminator 2, this was the Tigerbeat movie, the movie that teenage girls watched over and over again, yearning for the timeless love story. I was mixed on the first Avatar movie and not that excited about Aliens, but when I finally came around to this I fully bought into the magic. I love the scale of the ship, there are some technological gaps with the CGI extras and scale of the ship and water, but there's something wonderful about it, regardless. It's really amazing how great Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet are in this and how they lived up to it and beyond in the decades to follow. The worldbuilding is so great that this becomes pure escapism and a great comfort movie. And it took me about 25 years to finally get around to seeing this.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998)

This movie highlights the power of the Hunter S. Thompson's storytelling. Perhaps this was based on real events, but little things like the attorney and big things like the fictional drug they take show the hand of great fictional writing that makes this work so well. Thompson used to warm up the writer part of his brain my typing word for word from Ernest Hemingway books to get into the rhythm and mindset to write, something that really worked well for him, but I hadn't realized how similar of a style Hemingway had in his writing to take real events from his life and jazz them up with fiction. The only difference between the two of them is that Thompson would assert his works as non-fiction and Hemingway played off his life experiences as fiction, at least when he put it in writing. I love the Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas book. I love how he explains away his assignment at the motorcycle race, but it really isn't necessary when it comes to a film. And this is up there with one of the most faithful and best made adaptations of a book.

Iron Giant (1999)

One of those movies that has had a cultural footprint ever since it came out and I just never got around to seeing it. It's referenced in Ted Lasso and Futurama, I'm sure among others. The Futurama episode, a segment in an Anthology of Interest episode, features Bender as the Giant and Fry as the boy in a friendship to Kaiju battle with at a Giant Zoidberg. 1999 was a year of great cinema, and it was also the year of the first season of Futurama, and both that show and Iron Giant were animated in similar manners, a mix of traditional animation and 3D animation for special effects. It's a method that works very well for both uses of science fiction and the touching story here, elevates the film. The story reminds me of Lilo & Stitch, another extra terrestrial/kid relationship movie, that came out three years later. One of the reasons 1999 was a strange time in film was that the existential crisis at the end of the 20th century was that the cold war ended and life was too normal for Gen Xer's to find purpose. There was a questioning of our place in the universe, aliens were big interest in pop culture, both fictional in The X-Files, but it was also part of a broader curiosity in possible real life aliens and a distrust in government. Rage Against the Machine broke up as a band before the George W. Bush administration, they weren't raging against the conservative machine we see today, but of injustices in general. With 9/11, society and art changed, but in 1999 film was tackling very different philosophical, perhaps more personal, issues.

Final Thoughts

I loved the '90's, and watching movies during that decade was incredibly exciting. Somehow movies like Barton Fink, Dead Man and Titanic were films that I didn't get to for at least a decade after their release. Hell, I hadn't heard of most of these movies during the '90's, and Reservoir Dogs might have been the only one that I actually saw during the decade that it came out. I would agree that 1999 is one of the great years in cinema, but the whole decade had high points to it, even if at the time the culture might have applauded some films that were simply, "just fine."

Running List on Letterboxd

Up Next!

Bamboozled, The Royal Tenenbaums, Catch Me if You Can, Lost in Translation, Sideways, King Kong, The Host, Be Kind Rewind, A Serious Man.