90s All Over Me takes inspiration from 80s All Over, the Drew McWeeny/Scott Weinberg podcast that attempted to review every major film release of the 80s one month at a time; that podcast ended circa early 1985 and McWeeny has continued the project on his Substack.
The aims of this series are somewhat more modest; rather than covering every month and ever release in said month, each entry will cover a year of the 1990s, focusing solely on what I’ve seen from that year. The first half of each instalment will spotlight what I saw theatrically over the decade, contextualising those works in my own moviegoing journey between the ages seven to 17 as well as their wider cultural import.
The second half will cover every other release I’ve seen of that year across physical media, television, and streaming.
Before diving into the peculiarities of that decade and my own celluloid Bildungsroman, this prequel entry will lay the groundwork for the decade to come.
- 1989 Total films seen: 96
- Total seen theatrically: 8
- VHS/TV/DVD/Streaming: 88
Theatrical
Batman
Director: Tim Burton; Cast: Jack Nicholson, Michael Keaton, Kim Basinger; Writers: Sam Hamm, Warren Skaaren, (Based on characters by Bob Kane)
The movie event of 1989, and of my childhood until Jurassic Park stomped onscreen in 1993. As a hype machine and one of the progenitors of the dominant commercial film genre today, Batman is a thoroughly dissected movie specimen, and my affection for it is well-documented, so I won’t rehash all that here. What I will reiterate, though, is the film’s import in sparking my own cinephilia. Burton was the first director I knew by name and face—in large part thanks to a ‘Making of’ book in which he featured in stills—hence instilling a fascination, perhaps to a fault, with the director as auteur. Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson were also the first movie stars I followed into past productions, with Nicholson’s deep bench of classics providing an access point into 70s cinema.
Ghostbusters II
Director: Ivan Reitman; Cast: Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Sigourney Weaver; Writers: Harold Ramis, Dan Aykroyd
For a time, at least in this kid’s schoolyard, as major an event as Batman. Of course, Batman enjoyed a long tail into the 1990s and beyond while Ghostbusters II served, for a quarter century, as an emphatic franchise full stop. For much of that period it was undervalued, then conversely over-valued by fans who felt true Ghostbusters should be men or, if absolutely necessary, women related by blood to said men. As it stands, Ghostbusters II is neither the best thing ever or the worst thing ever, but fine, its very fineness guaranteed by the level of professional craft of its crew, the talent and comedic gifts of its cast, and a Hollywood studio system of checks, balances, notes, and processes that ensure most major motion pictures are fine. However, something Ghostbusters II has over its funnier predecessor is a theme: where the original isn’t really about much, the way Ghostbusters II uses slime below the city as an embodiment of the city’s anger and aggression, necessitating a kinder, more Paddington-like disposition, is unexpectedly sweet and becomes more resonant with time as the world—Ghostbusters fans included—gets angrier.
Driving Miss Daisy
Director: Bruce Beresford; Cast: Jessica Tandy, Morgan Freeman, Dan Aykroyd; Writer: Alfred Uhry
Between Ghostbusters II and Driving Miss Daisy, Dan Aykroyd seemed like the biggest star on the planet to 7-year-old me. While the former was perhaps his final moment of marquee super-stardom, his Oscar-nominated performance in the latter set him up nicely for much of the lovely character actor work he’d essay during the 90s in films like Sneakers and My Girl. As for the Best Picture victor of 1989, those looking for an indictment of Academy fuddy-duddy conservatism should look elsewhere. I liked this film then and my appreciation has grown over time. I’m a well-documented Bruce Beresford fan—see here and here—and the film carries many of the qualities I admire about his work, including his aesthetic unobtrusiveness and clarity as a filmmaker and adapter of material.
Dead Poet’s Society
Director: Peter Weir; Cast: Robin Williams, Robert Sean Leonard, Ethan Hawke; Writer: Tom Schulman
In contrast to Driving Miss Daisy, my appreciation for Dead Poet’s Society has perhaps contracted with time, its grand gestures and inspirational moments becoming pat, though that’s partly because its tropes have been much-imitated and slipped into self-parody. Nonetheless, Robin Williams’ lead performance becomes richer, accentuated by the actor’s own history and passing. At this age I saw most movies with my mum. It was not uncommon for her to take me to films that skewed older, for which I’m grateful, and on a scene-to-scene basis the film engaged me and still does, though a film where a tyrannical father drives his son to suicide perhaps wasn’t entirely appropriate for a 7-year-old.
Shirley Valentine
Also not entirely appropriate: a downtrodden middle-aged housewife going to Greece for “sex for breakfast, sex for dinner, sex for tea, and sex for supper”. But much of the humour in Shirley Valentine was broad enough to engage, and with age I’ve come to appreciate the wit and humanity of Pauline Collins’ deservedly lauded performance and Tom Conti’s sly turn. From the carpetbagging director of Moonraker.
Weekend at Bernie’s
Also not entirely appropriate: young professionals puppeteering their boss’s dead body for a weekend. But hilarious to a 7-year-old and still holds some affection. They should remake it with Joe Biden. From the director of Wake in Fright and First Blood.
The Little Mermaid
More geared towards the 7-year-old filmgoer. The Little Mermaid isn’t a film I’ve revisited or hold in high affection, though I recognise its important role in Disney’s renaissance, which will form a big part of the 1990s moviegoing tapestry.
Honey, I Shrunk the Kids
Another Disney product and more my speed. I love that this adventure movie about tiny kids on an odyssey through their backyard while standard-sized scientist Rick Moranis fumbles for solutions was borne of the cracked minds of Stuart Gordon and Brian Yuzna, though Joe Johnston delivered the family-friendly product.
The Rest
Surveying the rest of 1989, two things stand out: sequels and stars. Alongside Ghostbusters II, the biggest sequels of the year were Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Back to the Future II, and Lethal Weapon 2. The first of these was a sequel so huge that its first trailer only needed to highlight its pending existence, without sharing a lick of finished footage.
Like Ghostbusters II, the critical pendulum has swung wildly on this one: it was undervalued as the least and lightest of the franchise for years, then overvalued following lesser instalments decades later. Its light touch made it my favourite as a kid; its lack of flair and atmosphere and dumbing down of characters Marcus and Salah irritated me as an adult; and today I appreciate above all the impeccable chemistry between Harrison Ford and Sean Connery and director Steven Spielberg’s filmmaking nimbleness, sorely missing from the most recent instalment.
Back to the Future II is an exhausting but fun Ouroboros, riffing on its precursor and echoing its beats across different eras and generations. It’s understandable why many viewers were taken aback by the below teaser shilling for the next entry at film’s end, though I suspect that has been somewhat overstated, and today moviegoers are now chagrined when there’s no connective tissue to future episodes.
In contrast, Lethal Weapon 2 delivers exactly on its pre-sold bill of goods, upping the comedy and action, adding Joe Pesci, and unfolding in a series of memorable and clearly delineated stunt and comedic set pieces.
That’s just scratching the surface: 1989 also saw The Karate Kid Part III up the ante with three maniacal bully villains looking to kill (?) Daniel LaRusso, while License to Kill dispatched Timothy Dalton’s James Bond on an atypical but entertaining revenge mission against Robert Davi’s pockmarked drug lord and Star Trek V: The Final Frontier sent Kirk, Spock, and McCoy on an unsatisfying adventure to its titular frontier. There were also comedy sequels in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, Fletch Lives, and Police Academy 6: City Under Siege; horror sequels in Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers, Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason takes Manhattan, Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child, and a Robert Englund-starring Phantom of the Opera that basically reinvented Gaston Leroux’s creation as Freddy; and a sequel in Troma’s patented comedy-horror-action-goulash style in The Toxic Avenger Part II.
Familiar screen partners also reteamed in new stories: Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner, and Danny De Vito in The War of the Roses and Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor in See No Evil, Hear No Evil, which I may or may not have seen in theatres but I’m erring on the side of not. Alongside these franchise entries, there were several franchise-starters: on top of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Weekend at Bernie’s and, most notably, Batman, series of varying lengths and repute were kickstarted with Look Who’s Talking, Major League, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Best of the Best, Warlock, Pet Sematary, and improbably the Japanese cult oddity Tetsuo the Iron Man.
Then there are stars. When thinking of 1980s stars, I typically gravitate to action and comedy marquee names, and there were plenty at work in 1989. Tango and Cash is a dumb and delightful pairing of Sylvester Stallone and Kurt Russell as sparring mismatched partners in a buddy-cop-actioner chasing Lethal Weapon’s successful tail. Stallone also headlined the boilerplate Lock Up, a prison drama that starts earnestly but culminates in Sly strapping villainous warden Donald Sutherland to an electric chair and threatening to fry him, while Stallone’s tall protégé Dolph Lundgren headlined early Marvel adaptation The Punisher and fellow Euro action star Jean-Claude Van Damme headlined Albert Pyun’s tatty Cyborg.
At the more reputable end of the spectrum, Mel Gibson and Harrison Ford returned to essay their other signature roles in Lethal Weapon 2 and Last Crusade, both every inch the star, while Timothy Dalton proved not quite the star with the underperforming License to Kill but was nonetheless effective as an avenging 007. Patrick Swayze also followed Russell and Gibson in the business-at-the-front, party-at-the-back hair department as the mulleted hero of Road House, while over in China an exciting new star, Donnie Yen, emerged in In the Line of Duty 4. On the comedy front, Dan Aykroyd was, as indicated above, enjoying an end of 80s victory lap with his Ghostbusters sequel and Driving Miss Daisy, while co-stars from the decade also headlined star vehicles: Chevy Chase in the abovementioned sequels Fletch Lives and yuletide favourite Christmas Vacation, John Candy in Uncle Buck and Who’s Harry Crumb?, Steve Martin in Parenthood, and Tom Hanks in Turner and Hooch and The Burbs.
Beyond action and comedy, one of the principal pleasures of the 1980s—and to some degree the 1990s—was seeing stars essay a range of roles across a variety of different genres and scales of production, a pleasure that has receded in the 21st century with the muscling of mid-budget, mid-range films from the marketplace. Sometimes a star would pop up in two or more releases in a calendar year, and while this was often due to scheduling and marketing factors outside an actor’s control, it nonetheless occasioned telling glimpses into those actors’ career stratagem. For instance, Michael Keaton headlined Batman this year, but also appeared in amiable comedy-drama The Dream Team, while Michael J. Fox headlined both Back to the Future II and Brian De Palma’s dark war drama Casualties of War.
While not high concept per se, Sidney Lumet’s Family Business feels high concept by virtue of the improbable casting of Sean Connery, Dustin Hoffman, and Matthew Broderick as father, son, and grandson, which might work if you have never seen any of these actors before in your life. Nonetheless, it’s a thoughtful and intelligent film, and between this and Glory speaks to the types of roles Broderick was pursuing as well as the esteem he was afforded by filmmakers and studios at the time. For Connery, meanwhile, Family Business allowed him to exercise more serious acting muscles than his befuddled patriarch in Last Crusade, and Michael Douglas similarly got to flex different acting muscles across Ridley Scott’s Japan-set thriller Black Rain and dark comedy The War of the Roses.
Mickey Rourke delivered one of his last solid lead turns in Walter Hill’s Johnny Handsome, but I won’t speculate which muscles were exercised on Wild Orchid: the actor famously declined heroic roles in films like The Untouchables throughout the 80s in favour of scuzzier parts, and 1989 evidenced both the best- and worst-case scenarios of that career philosophy.
Stars across a variety of ages and eras were afforded opportunity to shine, from scene-stealing 9-year-old Macaulay Culkin in Uncle Buck to 65-year-old Marlon Brando, returning to the screen after a 9-year absence in a short but pivotal stretch of A Dry White Season, and Elizabeth Taylor hamming it up in Tennessee Williams adaptation Sweet Bird of Youth. Kevin Costner, a year away from Dances With Wolves, made fathers and sons across America weep in Field of Dreams, while Tom Cruise, Daniel Day-Lewis, and Denzel Washington all ascended to the next tier of repute with their Oscar-winning or nominated performances in My Left Foot, Born on the Fourth of July, and Glory (no more Doctor Denzel). Al Pacino returned from a short stint in the wilderness after 1985’s lambasted Revolution, reconnecting with his fanbase in detective thriller Sea of Love, whilst another detective thriller, The January Man, didn’t really connect with audiences but afforded Kevin Kline a fun opportunity to play in that milieu; Kline’s straddling of eccentric comedy and darker-tinged drama in the role foreshadows his alternating across those genres for much of the 1990s. Meryl Streep made her first foray into broad comedy in She-Devil, Julia Roberts inched closer to superstardom as part of the ensemble of Steel Magnolias, Meg Ryan cemented her stardom in When Harry Met Sally, and Michelle Pfeiffer capped off her varied 1980s with The Fabulous Baker Boys.
A handful of director-stars also performed on both sides of the camera. I don’t remember very much about Eddie Murphy’s Harlem Nights nor Clint Eastwood’s Pink Cadillac, but I remember an awful lot of William Shatner’s awful Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. More successful were Woody Allen in Crimes and Misdemeanours and his segment of anthology film New York Stories, Takashi Kitano’s debut film Violent Cop, and Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V. While I’m a fan and apologist, I’m also the first to admit Branagh’s filmography is wildly variable, but on Henry V he leans into everything that makes him great as both actor and director.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t highlight Australian filmmakers. Several Australian directors working abroad had major releases in 1989: Peter Weir on the abovementioned Dead Poet’s Society, Bruce Beresford on the abovementioned Driving Miss Daisy but also disposable Tom Selleck comedy vehicle Her Alibi, Phillip Noyce on the exceptional Dead Calm and perfectly fine Blind Fury, and Phillipe Moira on the oddball Communion. On home turf, both Dead Calm and Bangkok Hilton provided a showcase for Nicole Kidman ahead of her American breakout in 1990, while pop ingenue Kylie Minogue had her first and most substantial film role in The Delinquents. As a Minogue fan, I campaigned for my parents to buy this film for me on VHS, watched fifteen minutes, was bored and didn’t watch it again until a quarter century later. It’s a very fine film, its titular delinquents (Minogue and US import Charlie Schlatter) not so much rebels as misunderstood victims of dysfunctional families processing feelings far outsizing their teenage frames and minds. Jane Campion also made her debut with Sweetie, which was critically lauded; Houseboat Horror was not. Finally, long-time critic and scholar Scott Murray helmed his only feature, Beyond Innocence, a regional romantic drama with a European sensibility.
On the world stage, Steven Spielberg delivered his first one-two punch of twin releases in a calendar year, with the abovementioned Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Always; while the latter is not highly regarded, it nonetheless showcases, as does Last Crusade, his preternatural gift for blocking and composition. James Cameron’s The Abyss was not the megahit that’s now par the course for its director, but its special effects achievements and underwater photography are unimpeachable. Glory set the course for much of Edward Zwick’s subsequent career as a maker of big, bloated historical event movies, while Oliver Stone made his remarkable second of three Vietnam War-focused features, Born on the Fourth of July, and Brian De Palma grappled with the obscenities of wartime crime in Casualties of War. John Hughes’ fingerprints are over Uncle Buck as writer-director and Christmas Vacation as writer, while Michael Lehmann’s Heathers decimated the Hughes teen film with venom and Joe Dante dug into suburbia with similar satiric relish in The Burbs.
Finally, key works hailed from both rising and veteran independent and arthouse filmmakers in the US—Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy, Spike Lee’s vital and wonderful Do the Right Thing, Steven Soderbergh’s excellent Sex, Lies and Videotape, Jim Jarmusch’s bemused and witty Mystery Train, the late, great David Lynch’s celebrated Twin Peaks pilot—and overseas: Pedro Almodóvar’s sly Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down, Peter Greenaway’s preening The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, Peter Jackson’s Meet the Feebles, Hayao Miyazaki’s Kiki’s Delivery Service, and Alan Clarke’s final work The Firm.
I’ve mentioned Woody Allen’s segment of New York Stories: the others were contributed by Francis Coppola and Martin Scorsese, neither slouches. The Scorsese segment is engaging and stylish, but I find Coppola’s segment, scripted by the young Sofia, interminable. I also don’t care much for the Canadian film Jesus of Montreal, nor Terry Jones’s Erik the Viking, nor The Tall Guy (Richard Curtis’s first feature script), nor Danny, the Champion of the World, a rather boring adaptation of a warm and evocative Roald Dahl novel, nor We’re No Angels, a bland misstep for gifted weirdo Neil Jordan. Nor do I care for the horror works hailing from Brian Yuzna (Society), Tobe Hooper (Spontaneous Combustion), and Wes Craven (Shocker). But I’m including them all here for completism.
For the record, some notable films of 1989 that I have not included because I haven’t seen them: Say Anything, Scandal, The Package, K-9, Next of Kin, Lean on Me, Deep Star Six, The Wizard, Enemies: A Love Story, The Toxic Avenger Part III.
If you’re still here, thanks for enduring. The next instalment kicks off the 1990s proper, and it will be interesting to see where the decade takes the class of 1989, what seeds planted this year blossom, and which filmmakers and actors flourish and which falter as the decade unfolds. Til then …