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The 1990s The Era of Mainstream Films and "Indie" Cinema, the Rise of Computer-Generated Imagery, the Decade of Re-makes, Re-releases, and More Sequels Part 6 Film History of the 1990s Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6 Film History by Decade Index | Pre-1920s | 1920s | 1930s | 1940s | 1950s | 1960s 1970s | 1980s | 1990s | 2000s | 2010s |
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Notable British Films:
The decade's most successful British film was first-time director Peter Cattaneo's Best Picture-nominated The Full Monty (1997) about a group of displaced, unemployed Sheffield steel-mill workers who become 'Chippendale-style' male strippers. It brought new popularity to two hits: Hot Chocolate's "You Sexy Thing," and Donna Summers' "Hot Stuff." The edgy and visually-fresh film about drug addiction, Trainspotting (1995) was based upon Irving Welsh's famous novel set in Edinburgh, with original Scottish characters (and unknown actors) including Renton, Spud, Sick Boy and Begbie, and featuring a pulsing soundtrack with Iggy Pop singing "Lust for Life". Although not a British film, Rob Roy (1995) starred Liam Neeson as 18th century Scottish legend Robert Roy MacGregor based upon Sir Walter Scott's legendary novel. Distinctive Independent Film-Makers: In the 90s' era of blockbusters, independent films made significant headway. The major studios set up specialty art-house production and distribution divisions, such as Sony Pictures Classics and Fox World Cinema. There were any number of shoestring-budget, non-mainstream films that appealed to disenchanted Generation-Xers, from directors such as Richard Linklater, Kevin Smith, Edward Burns, Todd Solondz, Gus Van Sant and Jim Jarmusch. Richard Linklater
Linklater's more accessible and sweet film Before Sunrise (1995) followed the overnight budding romance between a traveling young American (Ethan Hawke) and a French student (Julie Delpy) in Vienna, and the dialogue-heavy SuBurbia (1997), an adaptation of writer/actor Eric Bogosian's play, examined a group of punk twenty-somethings outside a suburban Austin convenience store. In the new decade, Linklater's innovative 6th film, Waking Life (2001) combined digital video and animation to produce a highly philosophical avant-garde film. Kevin Smith: The Jersey Trilogy
Edward Burns: The Long Island Trilogy Actor/writer/director Edward Burns' first feature (the first in a so-called "Long Island trilogy") was The Brothers McMullen (1995) - an old-fashioned character study of three Irish-American brothers living together in Long Island, New York. Burns' follow-up films were the romantic comedy She's the One (1996) about a pair of rivalrous brothers (Ed Burns and Mike McGlone) both interested in the same woman (Cameron Diaz), and the romantic, blue-collar drama No Looking Back (1998) set in a quiet coastal town, with Lauren Holly and Jon Bon Jovi. Todd Solondz
His next film was the challenging, controversial dark comedy of sex and perversion unusually titled Happiness (1998). It was about a predatory, suburban pedophile father/family man Bill Maplewood (Dylan Baker), a psychiatrist by profession, who in a startling scene shot with slow-motion closeups, gazes with affection at an 11 year-old boy (!), one of his son's classmates, during a little-league baseball game. His next dark film was Storytelling (2001), with two concurrent plotlines (titled "Fiction" and "NonFiction") examining racial and sexual themes. Gus Van Sant
Larry Clark One of the most controversial and bleak films of the 90s was from a Miramax-related studio (with Gus Van Sant as executive producer). It was still photographer and director Larry Clark's debut film, the unrated Kids (1995), about self-destructive New York street teens engaged in unprotected sex, hedonism, and drug-taking. It mostly focused on the promiscuous sexual experiences of AIDS-infected Telly (Leo Fitzpatrick), a teen-aged seducer who desired only virgins (one of whom was Chloe Sevigny). A similar follow-up film was the unrated, compelling Bully (2001), another graphic film (often accused of being exploitative and leering) based upon real life events, about amoral, drug-using, violent youth who naively conspired to murder one of their "bully" friends. Jim Jarmusch After his successes with the low-budget feature Stranger Than Paradise (1984) and Down By Law (1986), Jim Jarmusch's films of the decade included Night on Earth (1991) - an anthology of five "road" stories, the offbeat western Dead Man (1995) with Johnny Depp, and the documentary on the rock band Neil Young and Crazy Horse in Year of the Horse (1997). Original Films of the Decade: Tim Burton's fantasy romance/comedy Edward Scissorhands (1990) starred Johnny Depp as the scissor-handed title character who was created by Vincent Price and adopted by an Avon lady. Mike Nichols' The Birdcage (1996) was the American version of La Cage Aux Folles (1978), a weird in-law story about a young man who brought his fiancee home to meet his parents. Robin Williams starred as gay nightclub owner named Armand Goldman, and Gene Hackman as a right-wing conservative politician - whose daughter is engaged to William's son. Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys (1995) remade La Jetee (1962, Fr.), starring Bruce Willis who came back from the future (the year 2035) to learn what killed 5 billion people years earlier. Wes Anderson's Rushmore (1998) was an unusual but smart comedy about an improbable love triangle between precocious 15 year-old 10th grade private school student Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman), his befriended depressed local steel factory millionaire/magnate and jaded mentor Herman Blume (Bill Murray), and Rushmore Academy's recently-widowed first-grade teacher Ms. Rosemary Cross (Olivia Williams). And Reese Witherspoon starred as determined Student Council candidate Tracy Flick in Alexander Payne's satirical Election (1999).
Playwright Neil LaBute's film-directing debut work regarding relationships was the provocative low-budget black comedy In the Company of Men (1997), a cruel and unsettling misogynous story about two businessmen, Chad (Aaron Eckhart) and Howard (Matt Malloy), on a six-week trip who decide to romance and then brutally dump an unsuspecting deaf woman, with lines such as: "Never trust anything that can bleed for a week and not die," and "What's the difference between a golf ball and a G-spot?...I'll spend twenty minutes looking for a golf ball!" And Todd Haynes' second feature Safe (1995) brilliantly told the story of a fragile, vulnerable Southern California housewife Carol White (Julianne Moore) who suffered from environmental illness and retreated to a perfectly sterile world beyond germs in Wrenwood - a holistic center near Albuquerque, New Mexico. There, she became further alienated, isolated, and detached from life - the film was interpreted as a comment upon the AIDS crisis of the decade.
One of the decade's best actresses, Ashley Judd made an impressive film debut in writer/director Victor Nunez's quiet character study and sleeper film Ruby in Paradise (1993), about a Tennessee heiress who fled her home and became a clerk in a Florida souvenir shop. For the remainder of the decade, she starred in crime dramas and thrillers (often as a reluctant victim), such as A Normal Life (1996), the serial killer thriller Kiss the Girls (1997) with Morgan Freeman, Eye of the Beholder (1999), and director Bruce Beresford's Double Jeopardy (1999) with Tommy Lee Jones. Documentary Films: Animated - and Family Oriented Films: Disney's studios had a number of animated-cartoon feature classics in the 90s:
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990) with Raphael, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Donatello succeeded (and grossed $130 million) with stylish comic-book violence and licensed product merchandising until the public was saturated with two more sequels in 1991 and 1993. Beethoven (1992) was about a tiny puppy adopted by suburb-dweller Charles Grodin that grew into a giant, slobbering and destructive St. Bernard who was threatened by an evil veterinarian (Dean Jones). Free Willy (1993) told of a boy (Jason James Richter) punished for vandalism by having to clean up the graffiti mess at a theme park, where he developed a close emotional bond with one of the performers - a killer whale named Willy (Keiko).
Japan's collectible Pokemon trading cards and video games (Nintendo and Game Boy) became enormously popular with America's children, courtesy of Warner Bros. studios. The crude and cartoonish Pokemon: The First Movie (1998), dubbed in English for American audiences, had the most lucrative Thanksgiving weekend film opening of the 1900s when released in the US in 1999. Its "pocket monster" star was Pikachu, a bright-eyed, baby-talking yellow creature with a lightning-bolt tail. The gross-out, vulgar feature South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut (1999) rivaled Disney's family-oriented animations, and produced an Oscar-nominated song "Blame Canada"with bawdy lyrics - ("Time's have changed, Our kids are kids are getting worse, They won't obey their parents, They just want to fart and curse!..."). In 2001-2003, the first three years of the new Oscar category of Best Animated Feature, there were many worthy competitors:
Adult-Oriented Films: Filmmaking and production expenses continued to escalate, as well as the violence and sex depicted. In some cases, the returns were enormous. Henry and June (1990), based on Anais Nin's memoirs, was the first film to be released with the NC-17 (No Children Under 17 Admitted) rating (which had replaced the old "X" rating in 1990 without the commercial stigma) for its explicit handling of sex.
The most anticipated film was legendary director Stanley Kubrick's psychosexual Eyes Wide Shut (1999), his final film released posthumously in the summer of 1999, with real-life husband/wife superstars at the time (Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, who would later divorce in 2001). The dreamy, visually-beautiful, thought-provoking film was a sexy adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's 1926 novella Dream Story (Traumnovelle) and destined to become a Kubric classic. Although it was condemned as misogynistic, out-of-touch, and uncompelling, the story was about a Manhattan doctor (Cruise) who, after hearing an emotional confession of infidelity from his wife (Kidman), explored his own sexuality during a tortuous, adventurous nocturnal journey (including a visit to a masked orgy in Long Island featuring all-nude naturally-endowed females). Segments of the orgy scene in the film were digitally-altered in order to bring the film an R-rating.
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