Quaranstreaming IV: The Nineties
Featuring: Clueless, Jurassic Park, Boogie Nights…and more!
Watching
Clueless (1995)
The most unsettling feeling came over me while watching this. Here was a movie, made in the 90s, that felt like a movie made in the 90s, yet that also seemed to have been made by someone twenty years hence, satirically reimagining the 90s from afar. I don’t remember the 90s looking like this! And then I was struck by an even more unsettling feeling: no, I wouldn’t remember what the 90s looked like at all! I was two when this movie came out, as incapable of conscious awareness of fashion trends as Stacey Dash’s character is of driving faster than 30 mph on the freeway.
Clueless revels in the excess it lampoons. No prop is deemed extraneous by the production designer; every scene calls for a new outfit equally as outlandish as the last, on every character, no matter their place in society. It is part of what I am now deciding is a venerable pantheon of films (to include Little Miss Sunshine and A Ghost Story) to use a Nietzsche prop as shorthand to telegraph a character’s perceived intellectual superiority.
Loosely adapted from Austen’s Emma, Clueless makes some points. Though it’s a brief moment, I was especially touched by Cher’s “how can I be a better person” monologue. She thinks of the people she knows and picks out one little good thing about them, likely the kind of trait they themselves don’t even think twice about. How touching, to find out that a friend admires something about you that you don’t even notice yourself.
Jurassic Park (1993)
There are so few good, pure adventure movies these days, the kind that serve you a little bit of exposition in the beginning to help you get your bearings before setting you loose in a world of thrills. And there are stakes! Oh, stakes, how we’ve missed you. The world is not at risk, the universe is not going to implode, there’s just a bunch of humans on an island with a bunch of hungry dinosaurs! The T-rex eats somebody! It traps two children under a car over a sinkhole! Will Laura Dern survive to inherit the earth? Oh how good it feels when a blockbuster just lets you have fun.
Election (1999)
I’m historically cool on Alexander Payne. Election does not really change my opinion of him, but I enjoyed it far more than his other movies. The comedic flourishes are so fresh: Chekov’s judgmental janitor, appropriating the screaming from Ennio Morricone’s Navajo Joe score, the bait-and-switch of introducing gradually more narrators to what at first seems like a two-person show. And besides all the subscription-tier funny business there’s also just all the straightforward situational humor (Tammy’s “punishment”? Getting to transfer to the all-girls school she always dreamed of). Through the magic of makeup, hairstyling, costuming, and acting, I did not for one minute question that Reese Witherspoon was a high school student. She was actually 23, which is for the best. Tying anything about this movie into Our Current Political Moment is far above my paygrade for this newsletter.
Boogie Nights (1997)
(YES MIKE ALAN, I HAVE FINALLY WATCHED BOOGIE NIGHTS)
*ahem* Paul Thomas Anderson was basically my age when he made Boogie Nights, which is nearly unfathomable to me for at least two reasons:
my ability to assemble a period-appropriate playlist that just absolutely slaps is not nearly as good as his is and it never will be
I cannot imagine having the confidence to convince anyone, in the mid-90s, to finance an easy, breezy hangout movie about the adult film industry, let alone to the tune of this one’s reported $15 million budget
I already remarked on Twitter that I was astonished that the gay character in the movie whom I had remembered reading about years ago is not the same person as the character who shoots himself whom I had remembered reading about years ago. Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Scotty is such an endearing third wheel—nervous, average-looking, hopelessly prone to falling in love with straight guys. All his tragedies are small-scale and he’s spared a heartbreaking end, unless “continuing to work as a boom operator in an industry with no clear career advancement pathway for technical crew” is your idea of heartbreaking, which it probably should be.
Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
Eyes Wide Shut has been pitched to me throughout the years as, variously, one of the great Christmas movies; a dark and subversive defense of marriage; a dark and subversive takedown of marriage; a feel-bad movie about the pointlessness of living in a world where the powerful can get away with doing what they want without repercussion. It came to me highly recommended both by straight Catholic friends and nihilist gay strangers whose opinions I source from podcasts while cooking. It’s fine, although it is very funny to me that one could also, not inaccurately, describe it as the story of a husband so emotionally insecure he reacts to his wife’s telling him about her onetime sexual fantasy with another man by going to the opposite extreme of fleeing the city in the middle of the night to attend the underground masquerade sex party of the 0.001%.
Nicole Kidman nails her audition for the part of a Bergman heroine. Tom Cruise is…I mean, look, I understand that because he and Kidman were together at the time this was an opportunity not to be passed up (and because apparently Kubrick gets a rise out of refusing to let one of the most bankable movie stars in the world get any action), but it’s difficult for me to get over the way he perambulates through this knock-off New York like a humanoid model in a video game powered by a GPU several generations too old to adequately render the full range of human expression. This was probably just a Kubrick suggestion too. When did he start taking botox again? Surely not that young.
Se7en (1995)
Aww YES, NOW we’re talking, straight into my VEINS, baby. THIS is the kind of 90s nonsense I was LOOKING for when I arbitrarily decided to fill in my blind spots of that decade. I am of course a longtime David Fincher enthusiast, and while I think it’s been tempered by years of refining my taste on older, stranger, and more perspectivally diverse movies, like John Updike in that one quote that’s for some reason on the back of every C.S. Lewis book, returning to his work renews all my old admiration.
After watching Se7en I saw someone somewhere describe it as a giallo film which makes complete sense. Italy could never! The great fun of this movie is the gruesomeness of the murders and the stylishness of the worldbuilding. We’re in a city that’s not quite New York—the apartments are too big; maybe Albany? yet there’s a subway—but borrows all of the big apple’s bruised and mealy parts. Putting Morgan Freeman here as a detective in his final week before retirement is a genius framing device easily and rewardingly upended when the murders don’t take place one-a-day as you might expect.
All that Fincherian excess: who else would go to the trouble of stocking the killer’s house with a room full of thousands of notebooks, each of which were filled up to completion by the production designers (or their interns)? Suddenly I want a documentary about the life of an intern on a David Fincher production. Make it happen, Sony.
Starship Troopers (1997)
I got the point after 15 seconds.
Reading
This caught me by surprise: there are only 9 films by Black directors in the Criterion Collection.
The other thing that caught me by surprise is just how much of a bumbling dolt Criterion president Peter Becker comes off as. (“I will admit that I didn’t know ‘Medicine for Melancholy’ when it came out.”) I had been under the impression that there were more films by Black directors represented under the Criterion label than there really are, so the fact that I was mistaken overrides what is normally my contribution to the Canonical Representation Discourse. Namely, there are a lot of different groups competing for representation in an arbitrary canon like the one Criterion curates: films from Latin America, films from Asia, films from the Middle East, films from Africa, films by women, films by religious minorities, films by queer filmmakers, films made in the silent era, documentary films, etc. Sometimes these categories overlap, but the basic point is by privileging one group you’re always going to be delaying another group’s inclusion. Given the way the film industry works, there are a lot of rights issues and restoration problems that can get in the way of releasing a movie on a boutique label. I had thought such was the case with Criterion and movies by Black filmmakers, but the above article pretty clearly demonstrates that it was not so. I hope they start to do better, soon. It’s not like anyone was clamoring for a Criterion release of Wildlife.
Coming Soon
PTA has started filming his new movie, Soggy Bottom, with Bradley Cooper, one of the Haim sisters, and (as of two days ago) Benny Safdie. I am so curious to learn about how filmmakers are handling production during the pandemic. On-set photos show the crew all masked up but I have so many questions! What’s it like to be on cast, are you screened for your temperature and everything every morning? How are they going to handle scenes of intimacy? Are all crowd scenes going to be either rewritten or fully CGI from now until 2030?
Hirokazu Kore-eda continues his run of international productions with a Korean feature, Broker, about families linked by a “baby box” where they can deposit children they are unable to raise (presumably for adoption…but who knows).
The Berlin Film Festival will take place as planned in person next year. They will also be rejiggering their acting awards to be gender-neutral: one for a leading performance and one for a supporting performance.
Other 90s movies I ran out of room to write about: Boyz n the Hood (tender if preachy), Shanghai Triad (sultry and depressing), Strictly Ballroom (très Baz), The Big Lebowski (10 years ago if you had read me the synopsis of this movie and then told me I would love it I would have laughed in your face, and I would have been an idiot), La Cérémonie (girls just wanna symbolically murder their employers), Secrets & Lies (help, my (39M) niece (21F) and her half sister (28F) are unionizing against me, my wife (39F), and my sister (44F) to protest our unethical keeping of secrets and telling of lies)