90s | Wanderings and ... wonderings.

Dec 05 2021

Cinema, Film, Movie, Movies, Uncategorized, United States

Executive Decision (1996).

This curious movie wouldn’t be made today, with its suicide bombers and hijackers. And Seagal (sort of) headlining a motion picture. The good news is he isn’t in it for long, which kind of adds to the charm. Roger Ebert’s review at the time is hilarious, “I perked right up” his description of Seagal’s death. And when a sleazy J.T. Walsh turns up in a film you just know it’s going to be a ludicrous ’90s riot.

It has the most irritating scene and character title intros ever, this digital text at the bottom of the screen with that gimmicky digital noise. You know what I’m referring to? If not, then watch it. This was an age when shite like this was churned out monthly. Almost every single one of these films contains an identical round table discussion of generals/admirals with the lone voice of reason/geeky interloper in the middle. It’s the Golden Age of shite. Before everyone got so sensitive.

Anyway, it’s a highly entertaining hoot, popcorn nonsense for a lazy Sunday.

Tagged 90s, Action thriller, Cinema, Film, Netflix

Aug 23 2019

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Cinema, Film, Movie, Movies, Uncategorized

Waterworld (1995) – Mad Max on water.

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A notorious ‘flop’ that actually turned a small profit, Waterworld (1995) is at equal turns demented, awful, and glorious. A lot of the smug and snooty assassination of it clearly came from critics of the era who decided the omniscient Kevin Costner was getting too big for his boots. The movie is indeed patronising and way too overblown, character decisions perplexing, the dialogue stilted, and Costner appears to be sleepwalking through much of it and at full performance attempting a Clint Eastwood ‘Man with No Name’ number. And it can’t hold a candle to any of the Mad Max movies.

However, the stunts and action set pieces are nothing if not spectacular, and it’s one of the few ecologically themed movies out there, something with a vision that at least attempts to make a point. There are also so many peculiar moments amidst the explosions: Kevin Costner drinking his own piss, Kevin Costner’s gills and webbed feet, Dennis Hopper – who appears to have wandered off the set of Speed (1994) – away with the fairies, and the interlude with the loco Irish (or he is Scottish? Or a mixture of the two?) would-be rapist who has a talent for hoarding paper. It’s an experience.

Nothing’s free in Waterworld.

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Britain, Cinema, Edinburgh, Movie, Movies, Uncategorized

The Phantom Menace (1999) two decades on.

I recall the incident well – HMV, Princes Street came to a standstill as the trailer was broadcast on a Sunday afternoon. “Jesus fucking Christ, this looks epic,” I said to myself. The matter is, I did indeed think it was a belter of a movie, viewing it four times that summer of ’99.

The overwhelmingly negative reaction to the movie is perhaps the first case of fanboys going ape, sending shockwaves through an industry a bit slow to catch on to the power of the internet with its bloggers and keyboard warriors.

It’s 2019 and I legit believe it’s not a bad film, and some moments in it are up there with the first two movies: the pod race, Anakin’s farewell to his mother, the climactic Darth Maul brawl, cracking scenes underpinned by substantive character development. You take out Jar Jar and it’s immeasurably better. And I don’t get why fans were complaining about this childish Binks cretin yet conversely whinged on the detail dedicated to taxation and trade wars, an adult domain buttressing the magic and the wonder.

I treasure it as a nostalgia piece, a cinematic madeleine cake taking me back to a time when my standards were low and I was easily amused.

Airport security pre 9/11.

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Waiting at the gate is an exploit I remember from that Friends episode (“The One with Ross’s New Girlfriend”, 1995) when Rachel – peak Jennifer Aniston with flowers in hand – waits for Ross returning from China, only for him to emerge with a new missus. Much like the whimsical innocence of mid-’90s sitcoms, we’ll never see such things in an airport again.

Looking at pre-9/11 airports is as if being confronted with an alien entity – the lax rules, the laissez-faire atmosphere of the buildings, the … freedom of the places. I flew on about seven flights prior to September 11, and even as a teenager I recall the airport endeavour was a doddle, much like crucifixion in the Python cinematic universe. It explains the success of the hijackers, especially when you consider box cutters and small knives were permitted on certain aircraft at the time.

I don’t think anyone with a modicum of concern for their own or another’s safety is bothered about making the ‘sacrifices’ of conforming to post-9/11 air travel rules. No bottle of Volvic allowed from outside the airport? Diddums. It’s a small price to pay.

The awfulness stems from interaction with passengers who are thick as fuck, and these are voluminous. Airports appear to be a breeding ground for the bottom-rung IQ scale of the general public. I’m talking about fuckers who line up at the conveyor belt oblivious to the omniscient signs on display indicating the liquid prohibitions, clowns who try and smuggle Prosecco on board, the haughty lot who protest at taking their shoes off, the numpties who insist on walking through the metal detector with a pocket full of shrapnel.

They are the real pain in the arse.

The 1999 movie vault is something special and scary.

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1999 produced some truly cracking movies, dare I say two-in-one arthouse entertainments. They were from the sunny prism of the Clinton-era dot-com bubble, but laden with doom, premonitions of a darker age, and concerned with the very nature of reality itself – its comforting distractions of material consumption and conformism. 9/11 changed everything; apathy was suddenly pummeled. The Y2K bug turned out to be fuck all and instead actual shit hit the fan. These movies – American Beauty, Fight Club, and The Matrix – capture that pre-9/11 unease with elan.

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They’re films of their era yet transcend the age because of the superior artistry on display. It’s not exactly fashionable today to laud the acting chops of Kevin Spacey, but he is superior in American Beauty, middle-aged melancholy defined as he squirms his way around suburban hell. The Matrix heralded a new dawn in special effects – bullet time and all that – yet was also one of the first pictures to probe with caution the digital landscape, 20 years before possessing a talking robot called Alexa was considered a normal pursuit.

In Fight Club, peculiarly a flop at the time (the pitfalls of bad marketing, they say) we find an Americana in the throes of an existential meltdown, angst-ridden males looking for something to fight for, a purpose or quest, amidst the dreariness of normalcy. Every generation needs a war.

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Though products of corporations, American Beauty, Fight Club, and The Matrix do not hesitate to bite the proverbial hand that feeds. There is a deep skepticism and paranoia running through them, that of the office as enslavement and deindividuation, the Michel Foucault Panopticon theme quite rampant. There’s also the sanguine at work here, that with mental and physical self-sacrifice and by disconnecting oneself from the cultural hegemony there is light, self-awareness, … happiness.

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Cinema, Dance music, Film, Movies, Trance

Human Traffic – the dark side of nostalgia.

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If you mute a movie and it looks infinitely worse then it’s a bad film. I can’t recall who said this but it’s a reasonable proposition. Such is Human Traffic (1999), a truly garish and ugly remnant from the late nineties, a poor man’s Trainspotting (1996) that on a 2018 viewing comes across as a student film cobbled together over a weekend. Like any nostalgic longing, it’s best just consigning these matter to the past where they belong.

In 1999 I thought this was the shit; now it’s just shit, a pilotless, plotless, theme-less advertisement for ecstacy, executed with the craft and subtlety of a sledgehammer and featuring some of the most irritating and insipid ‘characters’ in a British movie ever. I’ll never handle a floppy disk again, and I’ll never watch Human Traffic (1999) again.

Good tunes, though.

Tagged 90s, Dance, Human Traffic, Nineties, Rave, Trainspotting

Mar 25 2018

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Film, Movies, Scotland, Uncategorized

Blockbuster Video was the highlight of the ’90s.

Blockbuster-Video

The death of Blockbuster was the home video version of Francis Fukuyama’s End of History. Your standard Friday routine in the Glory Years consisted of rocking up to Blockbuster with a tenner of shrapnel cobbled together by pocket money and paper round wages, emerging from the Pearly Gates with Irn-Bru, Maltesers, and a VHS copy of Goldeneye (1995). The anticipation before the visit was usually better than the evening that followed – a bit like holidays. The YouTube/Netflix/Amazon era has nothing on the joyous grind that was hunting for ex-rentals in the bargain basket. Fuck the Spice Girls (not literally), Blockbuster was the Atlantis of the ’90s.

Tagged 1990s, 90s, Blockbuster, Blockbuster Video, Goldeneye, Home video, Nineties, VHS, Video

Wanderings and … wonderings.

Tag Archives: 90s

Executive Decision (1996).

Waterworld (1995) – Mad Max on water.

The Phantom Menace (1999) two decades on.

Airport security pre 9/11.

The 1999 movie vault is something special and scary.

Human Traffic – the dark side of nostalgia.

Blockbuster Video was the highlight of the ’90s.