Buying and Selling: The Movies of 1990
Instead of focusing on an individual movie, I’ve instead decided to look at an entire year’s worth of movies. I won’t be going very in-depth on any one movie, but instead I’ll cover some of the more noteworthy films of the year. My plan is to start at 1990, and work my way through the decade; we’ll see how that goes (no promises). I’ve chosen the 90’s, as that is the time period from which I have seen the most movies, good and bad.
The Facts
I have to be honest right up front: after looking over the list of movies released in 1990, this year appears to be pretty weak. I know, it’s a little strange for the first sentence under the heading The Facts to be an opinion, but that’s what the facts from my Flickchart tell me. Only one movie from 1990 is in my top 100, and only two more appear from 101 to 200. Although I may not love tons of movies from this year, I still have some strong likes and dislikes from a number of films.
The top grossing movie of the year 1990 was Ghost ($505M worldwide), followed by Home Alone and Pretty Woman. Dances With Wolves won seven Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director (Kevin Costner). Rotten Tomatoes lists GoodFellas, The Hunt For Red October, and The Freshman as its top 3 freshest movies of the year. Let’s get to it.
Selling – Dances With Wolves, Academy Award Winner
In all fairness, I haven’t seen this movie in over ten years. But, that’s kind of the point: I have nearly no interest in watching all 181 minutes (236 for the director’s cut!) of this ever again. I like this movie, and I’m sure it holds up as a fine film (not Oscar worthy, though). Points for the beauty of the natural landscape of South Dakota, and also for a performance from Costner that I would call “good.” And although the movie tells a good story, it loses points for giving me a little white-man guilt. And again, rewatchability factor is near zero.
Bonus points for inspiring WWF Superstar “Tatanka”, a stereotypical Native American wrestler that checks most, if not all of the offensive/racist boxes.
Buying – Ghost
This is the part of the review where things look a little confusing, and I have to explain myself. Dances With Wolves is a better movie than Ghost; I’ll admit that up front. HOWEVER, DWW is a Sell for me (its value to me is less than what I feel it should be/it’s overrated), whereas Ghost is a Buy (I think it is undervalued by most people/it’s underrated). My reasoning is related to the point I made above about re-watchability. I own Dances With Wolves on DVD; I’ve never put it in the player. I don’t own Ghost, but if I ever see it playing on cable, you’re damn right I’m putting in on (at least until the next commercial).
Also, this is a movie that we had a VHS copy of when I was a kid, and it got watched. A lot. So, the nostalgia factor is pretty high. I mean, every time I see Rick Aviles pop up (admittedly, only in Calito’s Way, The Stand, and Waterworld), I get a little excited and say, “hey, there’s Park Place Willie from Ghost! I love that guy!” And before it was cool to like Patrick Swayze for Roadhouse and Next of Kin, I was way onboard due to Ghost (and a year later Point Break, obviously). Swayze kills it as dead-but-still-in-love-and-can’t-let-go Sam Wheat, Demi Moore is quite fetching as Molly, the bad guy Carl Bruner is sleazy, and Whoopi does what she does. But really, this is just a cheesy romance-drama, with supernatural elements. All in all, I would admit that I overrate this movie, and advise you to Sell on me Buying Ghost.
Bonus Buy for the best use in a movie of a potter’s wheel that I’ve seen.
Selling – Back to the Future Part III/Rocky V/The Godfather Part III
I’m not an anti-sequel guy on principle; if done well, a second (or third, or fourth, or fifth …) movie in a series can enhance what the original accomplished (example: Rocky II). When done poorly, sequels are THE WORST. Back to the Future III and Rocky V get filed in the latter category.
Back to the Future Part II is about half as good as the original; Back to the Future Part III is about half as good as Part II. Completely unnecessary. It reminds me of the Austin Powers series: The first one was pretty good, but the sequels (at least for part 2; I stopped watching after that) took the same idea from the first movie, changed the story in only the slightest way, and re-used all the same jokes. LAME.
Twelve year old me was REALLY excited for Rocky V to come out. As a huge fan of the previous four films in the series, I was eagerly anticipating the next Stallone classic. I’m here to tell you, Rocky V is no classic. Way too depressing, way too much Sage Stallone and Tommy Morrison, and sorely lacking in montages. I like to pretend this movie doesn’t exist.
Briefly, on Godfather III. I’ve only seen this once, and it was at the end of a long day after watching the first two films in the trilogy. I don’t remember much about it, other than thinking it was better than I expected it to be (it had/has a pretty poor reputation), and that it was long, and a bit boring. Due to the circumstances of the first viewing, I may be underrating this one. Perhaps I’ll take some time one day to re-watch it.
Buying – Home Alone
This might be the most underrated movie from 1990, at least of the movies that I’ve seen. I really kind of love Home Alone. It’s so much fun. There are so many memorable lines from this movie, including a few I use on a semi-regular basis, such as: “Keep the change ya filthy animal!” and “Look what you did you little jerk!” Macaulay Culkin versus Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern is some fine family friendly slapstick comedy. If you don’t have it in your heart to enjoy this movie, I don’t think we can be friends.
Buying – GoodFellas, Best Movie of 1990
Yeah, best movie of the year, by a mile. What a great movie. GoodFellas checks in as the 37th best movie that I’ve seen, including best of 1990, and 14th best of the entire decade of the 90’s, according to my Flickchart. Sounds about right to me. If you want to read a review of GoodFellas, I’m sure there are plenty of great ones you can find elsewhere (and half of them probably lead with “For as long as I can remember I always wanted to be a gangster.”) They’ll tell you all the things that make this film a classic. I won’t get into any of that. I’ll just simply say, Scorsese, DeNiro, Pesci, Liotta – all at the top of their game for this one. Now go home and watch this classic, and get your f**kin’ shinebox.
Lightning Round – Buying Edition
Miller’s Crossing: Early Coen brothers; Super solid from what I remember, but I’ve not seen it enough to have a strong opinion.
Flatliners: I’ve got a soft spot for Keifer Sutherland, what can I say? Cool, creepy plot here, too.
The Adventures of Ford Fairlane: Cult classic, or just a shitty Andrew Dice Clay movie that me and a few of my friends like? I give it a buy for perfectly capturing the essence of Dice at his peak, and for all the memorable lines.
Misery: One of the better adaptations of a Stephen King story; talk about damning with faint praise …
Lightning Round – Selling Edition
Awakenings – There’s no way this movie holds up today. And there’s no way I’m going to find out first hand.
Arachnophobia – Seemed fine to me as a twelve year old, but seriously how hard up for entertainment would you have to be to want to watch this movie today?
Child’s Play 2/Three Men and a Little Lady/Look Who’s Talking Too – Remember what I said before about sequels? That if done well, they can enhance the original? That only applies when the original isn’t complete garbage in the first place.
Kindergarten Cop – Sorry, if you can’t even surpass the low threshold set by Twins, I’m not buying.
Conspicuous By Their Absence
Want to see: Wild at Heart, Darkman, My Blue Heaven, Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams (Of course I’ll watch it – it’s got Kurosawa right there in the title)
Haven’t seen it by now, so I’m probably fine: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Cry-Baby, Twin Peaks, Days of Thunder
You can’t believe I haven’t seen: Die Hard 2, Edward Scissorhands, Pretty Woman, Tremors, Predator 2, Total Recall
Conclusion
Well, that was kind of different. Fun, at least for me. I was reminded of a whole bunch of movies that I haven’t thought about for quite some time. After going through the lot, I still think 1990 was a pretty ho-hum year overall for film. GoodFellas is clearly head and shoulders above everything else, and after that it’s a bit of a mixed bag. Way too many crappy sequels, including quite a few that I didn’t mention in this review. In summary, I’d have to say that the bad outweighs the good, if only by a little.
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