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 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 spotlights what I saw theatrically at the time, contextualising those works in my own moviegoing journey from ages seven to 17 as well as their wider cultural import. The second half covers every other release I’ve seen of that year across physical media, television, and streaming.
Read the previous instalments on 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992 and 1993.
- 1994 Total films seen: 120
- Total seen theatrically: 9
- VHS/TV/DVD/Streaming: 111
Theatrical
In my previous piece, I mentioned enjoying what I saw in theatres at age 11 but hankering for more adult fare. I turned 12 in 1994, attended my first year of high school, and vividly recall not enjoying the first quartet of titles below, though I was not equipped with the critical skills to articulate precisely why, aside from feeling like they were movies for babies. I’ll get those out of the way first.
Richie Rich
Director: Donald Petrie; Cast: Macaulay Culkin, Jonathan Hyde, John Laroquette; Writers: Neil Tolkin, Tom S. Parker, Jim Jennewein.
While Macaulay Culkin was a genuine marquee movie star for a few years and better than most child performers of his era, like many actors he was only as good as his material. Home Alone was great; ditto Home Alone 2. Richie Rich is perfectly fine school holiday programming, but not built for posterity.
The Pagemaster
Directors: Pixote Hunt, Joe Johnston; Cast: Macaulay Culkin, Christopher Lloyd, Patrick Stewart, Whoopi Goldberg; Writers: David Kirschner, David Casci, Ernie Contreras.
Ditto this other Culkin fantasy film, where the actor appears in opening and closing live-action segments but for the bulk of the film inhabits a fantastical dimension of stories in animated form. I appreciate that The Pagemaster is at least pro-books.
Baby’s Day Out
Director: Patrick Read Johnson; Cast: Lara Flynn Boyle, Joe Mantegna, Joe Pantoliano; Writer: John Hughes.
The long tail of Home Alone is also evident in this John Hughes-scripted slap-schtick comedy. While Hughes continues to exert some hold over a certain demographic, as the empathetic articulator of 80s teen angst who withdrew Salinger-style from the public eye, this aura misses the detail that J.D. Salinger never made bank on a succession of scripts where Broderick Crawford or someone of his vintage got hit in the nuts repeatedly before falling down some stairs into a box of staples.
The Flintstones
Director: X; Cast: John Goodman, Rick Moranis, Elizabeth Perkins, Rosie O’Donnell; Writers: Tom S. Parker, Jim Jennewein, Steven E. de Souza.
From the writers of Richie Rich—with some contributions from veteran action scribe Steven E. de Souza—and the director of Beethoven. Lots of talented people toiled on The Flinstones, including actors Rick Moranis, John Goodman, Halle Berry, Kylie McLachlan, and Elizabeth Taylor(!), as well as DP Dean Cundey. Production design is impressive and all there on screen. But all that expense and talent and craft is sunk into a script with tiresome comedy that a half dozen dads with a carton of beer and the prompt “Prehistoric dad jokes” could have concocted in under an hour.
The Lion King
Directors: Roger Allers, Rob Minkoff; Cast: Jonathan Taylor Thomas, Matthew Broderick, Jeremy Irons, James Earl Jones; Writers: Irene Mecchi, Jonathan Roberts, Linda Woolverton.
Now to the good stuff. The Lion King was the first film I ever saw solo at the theatre. For some reason, growing up pre-internet in a regional city with a couple of TV channels, I thought it was a re-release of a classic Disney film, on the basis that it was populated with talking animals ala Bambi, Dumbo etc rather than princesses; the slick opening quickly redressed this. From Hans Zimmer’s rousing score to its impressive cell animation (with some CG assist), and from its archetypal storytelling to vocal performance highlights—such as Rowan Atkinson’s fussy Zazu and, especially, Jeremy Irons’ elegant scumbum villain Scar—this really is top-notch top to tail. As mentioned when I discussed Aladdin, on any given day that film, this one, and Beauty and the Beast could rotate for the title of best Disney film of the renaissance.
The Mask
Director: Chuck Russell; Cast: Jim Carrey, Cameron Diaz, Peter Riegert, Peter Greene; Writers: Michael Fallon, Merk Verheiden, Mike Werb.
It’s been an age since I’ve seen The Mask, but this was a huge one. Jim Carrey, while a veteran comedy player who’d been on TV and appeared in 80s movies like Peggy Sue Got Married, felt to me like the first movie star wholly birthed to my generation, not inherited from the 70s or 80s. Though I didn’t recognise it at the time, the same could be said of co-star Cameron Diaz. Director Chuck Russell isn’t remotely interested in photorealism in the film’s computer-generated effects, but like Spielberg on Jurassic Park conserves said moments for maximum impact rather than ladling them on. Hence the cartoonish effects, unlike other films of the time, have aged pretty well.
Dumb and Dumber
Directors: Peter Farrelly, Bobby Farrelly; Cast: Jim Carrey, Jeff Daniels, Lauren Holly, Mike Starr; Writers: Peter Farrelly, Bobby Farrelly, Bennett Yellin.
While The Mask sees Carrey delivering a Jekyll and Hyde performance, playing the straight man for half the film, in Dumb and Dumber he’s in manchild idiot mode from the outset. The outwardly milquetoast Jeff Daniels proves a game comedic partner, matching Carrey throughout. An impressive directing debut for the Farrelly Brothers, with its rough edges and imperfections part of its charm.
Maverick
Director: Richard Donner; Cast: Mel Gibson, Jodie Foster, James Garner, Alfred Molina; Writer: William Goldman.
I love Maverick. LOVE it. Like The Flinstones, this is an adaptation of a TV comedy with a lot of talent behind it—adapted for the screen by Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid scribe William Goldman, helmed by Lethal Weapon and Superman director Richard Donner, shot by Vilmos Zsigmond, edited by Stuart Baird, starring Mel Gibson, Jodie Foster, Jameses Garner and Coburn, Graham Greene, and Alfred Molina—but here those ingredients cohere and sparkle. Very funny and watchable, with a couple of well-staged Western action set pieces and terrific chemistry between Gibson (controversy noted) and a radiant Foster.
Lightning Jack
Director: Simon Wincer; Cast: Paul Hogan, Cuba Gooding Jnr., Beverly D’Angelo, Pat Hingle; Writer: Paul Hogan.
Another comedic Western, with Australian journeyman Simon Wincer returning to the genre after Quigley and following mainstream hit Free Willy. Paul Hogan steps into the Stetsons as the titular outlaw, further fulfilling some of the Clint Eastwood action hero aspirations that got in the way of Crocodile Dundee II being funny. His eye’s more on the comedic ball here, aided by Cuba Gooding Jnr. as his mute sidekick, and it’s amusing to think the Western heroes of 1994 were portrayed as BS artists, with tongue firmly in cheek, by Australian imports.
The Rest: From Clear and Present Danger to Gary Oldman
What did I want to see in theatres in 1994 instead of Richie Rich and Baby’s Day Out? Clear and Present Danger, The Client, and Disclosure seemed the height of serious adult cinema, based as they were on thick novels that adults read. Setting aside that rather naïve impression, two of those three turned out great. Clear and Present Danger is the third Jack Ryan feature spun from Tom Clancy’s espionage novels and the second to team director Phillip Noyce and Harrison Ford after Patriot Games. It’s more assured and nuanced than its predecessor, a mature and intelligent adult-focused spycraft thriller with occasional effective action scenes and a deep bench of talent in its support cast, including Willem Dafoe as another Clancy hero, John Kelly.
The Client, the first of two John Grisham adaptations from Joel Schumacher, similarly has a deep bench of colourful players in its cast, with Susan Sarandon earning a Best Actress Oscar nomination, quite uncharacteristic for this type of material. The late Brad Renfro, as a child who witnesses a mob accountant’s suicide and becomes target of both police and crims alike, is rather affected but holds his own alongside Sarandon and Tommy Lee Jones, and this might be Schumacher’s best and sturdiest work.
Disclosure was the first of two Michael Crichton adaptations from Barry Levinson. A silly industrial thriller in which Demi Moore sexually harasses Michael Douglas and then accuses him of same, it nonetheless fascinates as part of Levinson’s eclectic post-Rain Man filmography: no director today makes films as often, as high-profile, across as many genres, or with the same calibre of star power or studio bells & whistles as Levinson did in the 90s.
As a young fan of Jack Nicholson and Michelle Pfeiffer, I also wanted to see Wolf. I eventually did, not liking it, and despite repeat attempts and a growing appreciation for Mike Nichols as a filmmaker, I still don’t. I can see the seeds of what drew Nicholson, Pfeiffer, and Nichols to this project: it’s Nicholson and Nichols’ fourth collaboration, Nicholson and Pfeiffer’s second, Pfeiffer and Nichols’ first, and there’s commentary to be tapped about male menopause and corporate big dickmanship. But Wolf is the very definition of a film that just hangs there. It’s frustrating that the director of The Graduate—who had the cajónes to adapt Catch 22 to screen, who wrestled the provocative and thorny Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf to film and almost four decades later did the same for a work as ambitious and challenging as Angels in America—is completely indifferent to the genre he’s working in and musters no enthusiasm to try and master it.
As a Stallone fan, I wanted to see Demolition Man and The Specialist. Demolition Man is an underrated sci-fi-action-comedy gem, pitting Stallone’s tough 90s cop against Wesley Snipes’ bleach-blonde supervillain in a satirical utopian future without swearing, guns, or fast food. The Specialist is one for Stallone completists: it’s basically Body Heat with more explosions, sharing with that earlier touchstone a sweaty Floridian setting and John Barry score, but adding Stallone, Sharon Stone, a wonderful reptilian rogues gallery comprising James Woods, Eric Roberts and Rod Steiger, and lovemaking scenes in a large hotel shower, the hygiene implications of which kill any intended sensual effect.
As a Schwarzenegger fan, I wanted to see True Lies but had no interest in seeing Junior: clearly Schwarzenegger was attempting to repeat the 1990 one-two punch of action blockbuster (Total Recall) and high-concept Ivan Reitman-directed comedy (Kindergarten Cop). As expected, Junior is dire viewing, but True Lies is tremendously entertaining big-budget popcorn cinema, albeit the most inessential of James Cameron’s major works. It also features some of Jamie Lee-Curtis’s best work—even if, like Pretty Woman and Indecent Proposal, enjoying it is predicated on neither the audience nor director overthinking it (the 90s, not to put too fine a point on it, was weird)—and, by default, Tom Arnold’s best work.
Pulp Fiction was on my radar in 1994, but skewed substantially older, and I wouldn’t really discover the cult adoration for it—or films like Reservoir Dogs or Goodfellas—until a year or two later when I started reading Empire and other British movie-themed lads mags. I don’t have anything particularly original to say about Pulp Fiction, except to say it’s terrific and deserves its cult adoration.
Pulp Fiction’s release was shadowed by Natural Born Killers, much to Tarantino’s chagrin. An original Tarantino screenplay radically rewritten and transformed by Oliver Stone into a hyperbolic satire of the media’s obsession with violence begetting more violence, the film pushed the filming and editing techniques deployed on JFK to their furthest points, and its excesses have not aged particularly well. Producer Jane Hamsher’s rather craven book on the making of the film is more entertaining than the film itself.
Forest Gump, an undeniably impressive film I’ve never cared for, beat Pulp Fiction as the Oscar victor of 1994. I’ve never quite parsed whether the message of the film—be an idiot, follow orders, and you’ll go far; join the counter-culture, think for yourself, and you’ll die of AIDS—is satirical or not.
Their competitor The Shawshank Redemption has become the more beloved of the three: Frank Darabont’s luxuriously-paced, impeccably-crafted prison drama—currently occupying first place on IMDb’s top 250, as it has for many years—is a male tearjerker of the same ilk as Field of Dreams. Occupying neither IMDb’s top 250 nor multiple Oscar categories, aside from the Best Actress ballot, is Michael Apted’s Nell, proving that Oscar fortune does not always favour the boldly begging. It has a good Jodie Foster performance, but I’d rather watch Maverick again.
Along with Wolf, the other star-studded genre films of 1994 were Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Interview with the Vampire. Kenneth Branagh—ever the whirling dervish theatre kid, bless him—works much harder on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein than Mike Nichols does on Wolf, though likewise does not arrive at any particular affinity for or command of the genre, apart from how to land a few good money shots. In my 1989 piece, I referred to Branagh leaning into all his strengths as actor and director on Henry V. I like his three follow-up films—particularly Dead Again and Much Ado About Nothing—and am a documented admirer, but he also leaned into some bad habits. I can discern that Frank Darabont’s script is literate and faithful to the spirit and ideas of Mary Shelley’s source, and in another director’s hands—maybe Darabont’s, based on Shawshank—would be more effective and evocative. But Branagh does not vary his shooting style—big bold camera movements, long circling takes—or performance style—loud & fast when manic, soft & very slow & deliberate when sad—to meet the material halfway. He also, even more detrimentally, seems reluctant to tell Robert De Niro that most of his takes are bad, or De Niro’s makeup team that their work is bad.
In contrast, Neil Jordan’s Interview with the Vampire is lavish and satisfying, dexterously navigating its potentially campy terrain and eliciting excellent performances from Tom Cruise—author Anne Rice lambasted Cruise’s casting initially before sitting down to eat a serving of crow—and Kirsten Dunst.
Like The Shawshank Redemption, Mick Garris’s The Stand was another Stephen King adaptation, wrestling the author’s pandemic magnum opus onto television. Where Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein overdoses on director Branagh’s style, The Stand suffers from little discernible style or atmosphere. In contrast, Wes Craven’s New Nightmare and John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness are stylish auteur works. A bounce back for both veterans after a rough start to the decade, the former is an intertextual meta romp where actress Heather Langenkamp is terrorised by Freddy Krueger, the fictional menace she’s fought onscreen over the past decade, while the latter sees an investigator (Sam Neill, reuniting with his Memoirs of an Invisible Man director) searching for a missing King-like novelist whose fictions are bleeding into reality. While both directors would further probe this subject matter—Craven in Scream and Carpenter much later in Cigarette Burns—both nailed it the first time. Though Craven would find new popularity with the Scream films, this proved Carpenter’s last fairly unconditional success.
The cynical entertainment industry commentary of Craven and Carpenter’s films—as well as 1992’s The Player and Death Becomes Her—is also apparent in three other period-set films of 1994 that gently nibble at the hand that feeds them without ever risking losing a finger: Ed Wood, Quiz Show, and Bullets Over Broadway. Tim Burton’s Ed Wood valorises its impoverished, cross-dressing underdog director for his resourcefulness, invention, and go-get attitude, as well as fallen star Bela Lugosi for his magnetism and past accomplishments—both parts excellently played by Johnny Depp and Martin Landau—but doesn’t suggest either figure isn’t exactly where they should be in the pecking order.
Meanwhile, Robert Redford’s Quiz Show unveils the rigged machinations of a popular 50s television contest, but also highlights the Faustian complicity of its two very different contestants, a classy WASP academic played by Ralph Fiennes and a working-class Jew played by John Turturro. Finally, Woody Allen’s Bullets over Broadway, a 1920s-set Broadway comedy, affectionately ribs grand theatre dames, crooked investors and their wannabe actress girlfriends, and pretentious New York playwrights whose work—not unlike Turturro’s Barton Fink character’s oeuvre—is phoney and hollow: again, the industry is vicious, but personalities are worse.
Though its focus is more on character study and its showbiz frame of reference is further in the past, Candyman director Bernard Rose’s Immortal Beloved—a Citizen Kane-esque unpacking of Beethoven’s life starring Gary Oldman—could be considered kin to the above, as could Louis Malle’s Vanya on 42nd Street. Meanwhile, stage works adapted to screen from 1994 included David Mamet’s prickly two-hander Oleanna, the enjoyable The Madness of King George, and Death and the Maiden, a tense three-hander helmed by Roman Polanski with especially strong work by Sigourney Weaver and Ben Kingsley. Surprisingly, Cinema Paradiso director Giuseppe Tornatore’s A Pure Formality—casting Polanski alongside Gerard Depardieu as a detective interviewing a suspect and confined largely to one location—was not adapted from the stage despite feeling very theatrical.
Following the dark Broadway and Hollywood satire of Barton Fink, the Coen Brothers leagued up budget-wise with period screwball comedy The Hudsucker Proxy, while two new talents debuted with Clerks and Shallow Grave. While Kevin Smith has proven more a raconteur than filmmaker, there’s plenty of scrappy and coarse charm to Clerks. In contrast, Danny Boyle has grown in leaps and bounds since his debut, but Shallow Grave remains an effective, nimble thriller with alternately charismatic and unlikeable turns from Ewan McGregor, Christopher Eccleston, and Kerry Fox.
More seasoned independents Atom Egoyan and Hal Hartley continued doing what they do with Exotica and Amateur. The former is my favourite Egoyan film, moody and spiky and peppered with especially good performances—particularly Elias Koteas—while Amateur is my second favourite Hartley film after Trust, significantly spiced up by the oddball pairing of Martin Donovan and Isabelle Huppert.
I remember very little about John Sayles’ Secret of Roan Innish and cannot profess to knowing his body of work well, but the family film feels like an anomaly. Similarly oddly titled is Prince of Jutland, but it’s basically a rather boring take on the mythic source material underpinning Hamlet with Christian Bale as the titular avenging Prince. Even Hamlet was a remake!
Movie remakes of 1994 included Love Affair—whose predecessor An Affair to Remember was affectionally homaged in the previous year’s Sleepless in Seattle—its compositions barely in focus to conceal Warren Beatty’s crease lines; the sweet Miracle on 34th Street, scripted by John Hughes but weirdly lacking slap-schtick scenes like Santa tripping over his sack and landing in a cactus garden; Penelope Spheeris’ The Little Rascals; and The Getaway, Roger Donaldson’s sweaty Peckinpah update that subs Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger for Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw and doesn’t veer awfully far from its source. The year also saw family-focused adaptations of Black Beauty—which quickly illustrates why telling a movie from a horse’s point of view, even when voiced by Alan Cumming, isn’t advisable—and The Jungle Book, a spry and enjoyable mainstream breakthrough for Stephen Sommers.
Sequels remained a coin of the realm, though I’ve only touched on one so far in this piece, Clear and Present Danger. Two long-running series hit seven with Police Academy 7: Mission to Moscow and Star Trek: Generations. The quite unfunny Police Academy 7 came out five years after the last instalment—after a preceding six annual releases spanning 1984–1989—and with a pared-down ensemble, so was an ignoble end to an already ignoble series; however, it saved its best cast for last, with Christopher Lee and Ron Perlman among its players. Star Trek: Generations was the first Next Generation big-screen outing with a few members of the OG cast, notably William Shatner, for good measure. More recent franchise legacy sequels have handled passing the torch better, but there’s still something potent about seeing Shatner and Patrick Stewart share screentime.
Like Police Academy 7, there was a long break between Axel Foley’s second and third screen excursion, Beverly Hills Cop 3. The film’s failure was an inside job by star Eddie Murphy, uninterested in being funny, and director John Landis, on shakier ground than his 1980s heyday and reluctant to push back. Other sequel releases—apologies in advance to any pedants if I use Roman numerals where I should use digits and vice versa—included Highlander III: The Sorcerer, Phantasm III, My Girl 2, Major League II, The Naked Gun 33 1/3, Class of Nuke ‘Em High 3, The Next Karate Kid, and the very good Drunken Master 2. Two more sequels of note were Aladdin: The Return of Jafar, a cheap straight-to-video affair that was the first of Disney’s lucrative VHS sequel side hustle, and Scarlett, a lavish miniseries sequel to Gone With the Wind that is pure soap opera but never dull, with likeable lead turns from Joanne Whalley-Kilmer and Timothy Dalton, wisely not attempting to emulate Vivien Leigh or Clarke Gable. Finally, Emmerich and Devlin’s original sci-fi action success Stargate did not spawn film sequels but did birth a television empire. Quick shout-out to James Spader, one of those actors very much part of the tapestry of the decade, playing an oddball reluctant hero here and a slimy yuppie brownnose in Wolf.
While it would be another year before another Batman sequel, the long tail of 1989’s success was still apparent in the industry’s gravitation towards comic book source material. Warner Bros was not really mining its own DC library and Marvel was a few years from becoming omnipresent, but 1994 yielded the first Marvel adaptation since Albert Pyun’s skint 1990 Captain America, the equally frugal Roger Corman-produced Fantastic Four. An ashcan production to hold onto the property rights, it can be found on YouTube today.
Erring closer to the Batman mould was the pulpy, 30s-set The Shadow, adapting the comic strip and radio character famously voiced by Orson Welles in the 1930s. The film afforded Alec Baldwin the chance to scratch the itch of nearly playing Batman and director Russell Mulcahy the chance of playing in a larger sandbox with more toy parts than recent productions. The film is flawed but has style and production value, along with a vivid Jerry Goldsmith score.
Among contemporary comic book properties adapted to screen were Dark Horse titles The Mask (see above) and Timecop, a solid sci-fi actioner from director Peter Hyams starring Jean-Clause Van Damme. Like The Shadow, The Crow was adapted by an Antipodean visual stylist (Alex Proyas), and it’s mostly noteworthy as the final film of Brandon Lee. Lee’s performance is fascinating, veering between melancholic & haunted and Jim Carrey manic broad, with his real-life death during production accentuating the tragic dimension of the story. Though the film is impossible to parse from this event, it’s electric filmmaking in its own right.
A distant cousin to these adaptations is Crumb, a fascinating and repellent documentary about underground comic book artist Robert Crumb and his dysfunctional family courtesy of Terry Zwigoff; a distant cousin to Crumb is the acclaimed basketball documentary Hoop Dreams. Both say much about class, success, and failure in America.
Locally, two Australian films dominated the box office and discourse, Muriel’s Wedding and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert: both broad and entertaining, very mainstream but also personal and deeply felt outsider studies, and deservedly big hits.
Other local releases of 1994 included John Duigan’s Sirens, a spirited film in which Hugh Grant’s priest discourses with Sam Neill’s Norman Lindsay about censorship, art, liberation, and exploitation, all the while flanked by artist Linday’s titular models and muses; The Sum of Us, pairing two generations of Australian star, Jack Thompson and Russell Crowe, as father and son; another Crowe film, Hammers over the Anvil, a coming-of-age heritage drama featuring an imported Charlotte Rampling, notable as the final release from the South Australian Film Corporation as a production company; Metal Skin, Geoffrey Wright’s raw, simmering Antipodean spin on Rebel Without a Cause that feels like a celluloid manifestation of Edvard Munch’s The Scream; and Mary, a docudrama about Australian saint Mary Helen MacKillop.
From Australians working overseas came abovementioned titles like Clear and Present Danger, The Shadow, and The Crow, along with Fred Schepisi’s innocuous rom-com IQ and Gilliam Armstrong’s wonderful Little Women, still—for this viewer—the best adaptation of that cherished novel to screen and elevated by a wonderful cast including Winona Ryder, Susan Sarandon, Kirsten Dunst, and Claire Danes.
At the risk of claiming New Zealand’s finest as our own, I’ll also spotlight here two very fine dark dramas from that nation which served as calling cards for their directors: Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures (also the film that unleashed Kate Winslet) and Lee Tamahori’s blistering Once Were Warriors.
I haven’t touched on Harvey Weinstein yet in this series, but his fingerprints and famous scissor hands are all over the decade so far and this year in particular—whether as producer or merely distributor—across titles such as Pulp Fiction, Clerks, Heavenly Creatures, and Sirens, along with Three Colours: Blue and Three Colours: White (the latter my favourite—a very lonely opinion—of this thematic trilogy) and Il Postino, Michael Radford’s gentle Italian-Spanish-language period drama about the unlikely friendship between a simple-minded postman and exiled intellectual poet.
The multiple Oscar-nominated Il Postino, whilst not undeserving of acclaim, is a typical example of Weinstein’s strategic wrangling and feting of the Academy—including exploiting the death of its star—which he’d further master in the coming years with (better) titles like The English Patient and Shakespeare in Love. Weinstein’s craven pursuit of Oscar gold is why I cannot take the uproar accompanying Andrea Riseborough’s nomination for To Leslie very seriously; worse people have done worse, very visibly. Equally good or better foreign-language titles of the year included Ang Lee’s Eat Drink Man Woman, Zhang Yimou’s To Live, Russian drama Burnt by the Sun, and Claude Chabrol domestic thriller Torment.
Chabrol’s film was the French contribution to 1994’s erotic thriller canon, which was continuing to dim. I mentioned The Specialist above, which is more a Stallone action film and was Sharon Stone’s last film of this stripe; other titles included China Moon and John Dahl’s The Last Seduction, a TV movie—its shows, despite its craft—that got the bump to theatrical largely based on Linda Fiorentino’s femme fatale performance. William Friedkin would visit the genre the following year with Jade, but in the meantime released the fairly forgettable sports film Blue Chips. Intersection, featuring Stone and Richard Gere, was cast and promoted like an erotic thriller but was not, while Johnny Depp and Brad Pitt provided peak eye candy for their fans in Don Juan de Marco—with lovely support turns from an engaged Marlon Brando and Faye Dunaway—and Legends of the Fall, a gorgeous but bloated Edward Zwick historical family epic.
I sung Jim Carrey’s praises above with The Mask and Dumb and Dumber, but ground zero for this stardom was Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, launching Carrey as a fresh new comedy star untethered from the vanities of a Chevy Chase or Bill Murray or niceties of a Robin Williams or Steve Martin, at least for now.
Some of the old guard were still around, albeit with diminishing returns: John Candy in his penultimate film, comedy-Western Wagons East, and Chevy Chase—sold as a cool suave Fletch-type on the poster, but in reality playing a geek—in Cops & Robbersons, from jobbing Fletch director Michael Ritchie. Pauly Shore, who I find endearing, was wearing thin with In the Army Now. Clifford, a film I know solely because of Blank Check podcast, is a surprisingly astounding film that playfully casts Martin Short as a child terrorising—ala Beethoven—an uptight Charles Grodin, while John Waters bestowed Kathleen Turner with her first genuinely great role of the 90s with Serial Mom.
Following a run of serious roles, Michael Keaton deftly blends comedy and drama in Ron Howard’s witty media satire The Paper and rom-com Speechless, both underrated gems, the latter pairing Keaton not only with Geena Davis but with Christopher Reeve in a couple of scenes, making it the very first (and best) iteration of Batman v. Superman. Nicolas Cage pressed further into comedy territory following Honeymoon in Vegas with It Could Happen to You (opposite Bridget Fonda), Guarding Tess (with Shirley MacLaine), and Trapped in Paradise as the increasingly agitated brother of convicts Jon Lovitz and Dana Carvey, the latter doing a decent if unfunny Mickey Rourke impression.
Two major directors—Norman Jewison and Alan Parker—released comedies in 1994 with Only You and Road to Wellsville. Jewison, a Swiss army knife filmmaker in terms of genre, delivers a likeable Marisa Tomei and Robert Downey Jnr. pairing. Parker, despite his knack across various genres, has little flair for comedy and leaves a game cast stranded, though there’s plenty of well-shot period production value to admire around the poorly-timed mugging (Dana Carvey once again included).
Finally, the witty and charming Four Weddings and a Funeral was a commercial and critical darling, breaking out Hugh Grant in posh fop mode as a star and anointing screenwriter and eventual director Richard Curtis as a marble column holding up the British film industry.
I’ve alluded to several stars being birthed—some after years of toil, others instant sensations—in 1994, among them Grant, Carrey, and Diaz. A fourth would be Sandra Bullock with Demolition Man and, more importantly, Speed. While True Lies was a $100+ million big-budget action behemoth featuring a star of Charlie Chaplin-level global recognisability, Speed was a sneaky sensation from a former DP (Jan De Bont) making his directing debut, with a quotable script (framework by Graham Yost, dialogue by Joss Whedon) wringing considerable juice from its “Die Hard on a bus” premise and bolstered by the chemistry between Bullock and Keanu Reeves. Random shout-out to John Capodice (Speed, Ace Ventura, The Naked Gun 33 1/3) and Mike Starr (Dumb and Dumber, Ed Wood, On Deadly Ground, Baby’s Day Out), two of the many mutant character actors who helped make the 90s memorable.
Another star hatched in 1994 was the young Natalie Portman with Leon, titled The Professional in Australia. Luc Besson’s stylish, somewhat skeezy—especially in its longer cut—but very effective English-language debut—like Nikita a riff on Pygmalion—showcases terrific work from Portman, Jean Reno, and Gary Oldman delivering the very finest single-word line reading in history.
Elsewhere in the genre, Stephen Hopkins’ Blown Away featuring Jeff Bridges and an over-the-top Tommy Lee Jones (more on that in 1995) can probably lay claim to more explosions than The Specialist; Dolph Lundgren headlined Pentathlon, Wesley Snipes Drop Zone, and Eric Roberts Freefall; Michelle Yeoh and Donnie Yen headlined Wing Chun, Stephen Chow uncorked his James Bond parody From Beijing with Love, and Jet Li delivered his best work in his best film, Fist of Legend; and Meryl Streep added action heroine to her CV with the solid The River Wild. Finally, Kevin Reynolds’ follow-up to Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (with Costner producing), Rapa-Nui, is a historical adventure film set on Chile’s Easter Island: it’s entertaining, but with everyone speaking English it’s hard to take seriously.
For the record, some notable films of 1994 that I have not included because I haven’t seen them: Little Odessa, Cobb, When a Man Loves a Woman, The War, A Good Man in Africa, Backbeat, Little Buddha, Tom & Viv, That’s Entertainment! III, Pret a Porter, Reality Bites, City Slickers II, Mrs Parker and the Vicious Circle, Surviving the Game, Street Fighter: The Movie, Double Dragon, I Love Trouble, Blankman, Milk Money, Bad Girls, The Puppet Masters, The Ref, Renaissance Man, Getting Even with Dad, Airheads, and North.
If you’re still here, thanks for enduring and see you back here for 1995, when Batman returns (again), as does James Bond, while Kevin Costner sinks a fortune into Waterworld, Michael Bay explodes onto screens, Pixar is born, and Mel Gibson raises his flag and kilt for Scotland. To be continued...