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, 1993, 1994, 1995, and 1996.
- 1997 Total films seen: 138
- Total seen theatrically: 38
- VHS/TV/DVD/Streaming: 100
Theatrical
The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Batman & Robin, Speed 2: Cruise Control and Liar Liar
Four disappointments. Of the three sequels, The Lost World at least has a handful of well-crafted action and suspense set pieces, and Speed 2: Cruise Control a toothy Willem Dafoe villain turn. Batman & Robin is largely worthless, extinguishing Batman on film for the next eight years and snuffing out or stalling the careers of key cast members; so too did the wheels of the bus come off for Jan De Bont with Speed 2. Liar Liar, in contrast, is exactly what’s on the packaging and undeniably successful at what it does, but it’s also the moment Carrey began tethering the mania to the niceties and storytelling beats of more sentimental, predictable material.
Con Air and Face Off
Tethering for nobody was Nicolas Cage. Having first dabbled in action movies the previous year in The Rock—albeit playing a flustered in-over-his-head type ala Honeymoon in Vegas—Con Air sees Cage remould himself as a droll Southern-fried action hero and Face Off sees him inhabit both wildcard villain and tormented hero roles, as does a similarly game John Travolta. I still enjoy both these very broad, whip-smart dumb movies, the former Simon West’s best work and the latter John Woo’s best American work.
Titanic, LA Confidential, As Good as It Gets and The Full Monty
I saw four of the five Best Picture nominees theatrically, and it was a very mainstream—but satisfying—lineup following the gravitation to indie fare in 1996. Titanic was, of course, gargantuan, defying the trend of disastrous water-based productions (see Waterworld, Cutthroat Island, Speed 2) to make record-breaking bank, sweep the Oscars, and anoint Leonardo DiCaprio an object of worldwide adoration. The film itself is thrilling and ruthlessly manipulative. LA Confidential is my favourite of the nominated titles, meaty and muscular and propulsive and smart, and introduced Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce to myself and global audiences, two actors whose success I became disproportionately invested in—with rollercoaster results—over the next two decades.
As Good As It Gets feels more sitcom than profound with the passage of time, but it’s still the sharpest and most profound sitcom writing of the year. I saw The Full Monty twice in theatres and it was a fascinating study in contrasts and the Pavlovian effect of a packed house. The first time in theatres with a full audience, the joy and laughter the film elicited were infectious; the second time, in a large theatre with maybe a dozen other punters, it generated chuckles at best. Nonetheless, it’s charming and today I better grasp its portrait—like Brassed Off—of an industrial town hobbled by Thatcherism.
Alien: Resurrection and Starship Troopers
Chalk and cheese, but linked in my head as two Hollywood grossout science-fiction actioners from European directors, released weeks apart, where humans with big guns verse extraterrestrial parasites and the humans are kind of scummy. When writing about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein for 1994, I suggested Branagh faithfully adapted a very good script but bungled the tone. Screenwriter Joss Whedon insists a similar thing happened on Alien: Resurrection with Jean-Pierre Jeunet, one half of the French directing team behind Delicatessen and City of Lost Children. I respectfully disagree: while Jeunet’s style is more wilfully offbeat and flamboyant than predecessors Ridley Scott, James Cameron, or David Fincher, pivots in setting and style are part of the alien franchise’s DNA, and without Jeunet’s style this would be a very boilerplate Poseidon Adventure riff with Xenomorphs.
The gifted cinematographer Darius Khondji—following his work on City of Lost Children, Seven, and Evita—feels like the second auteur on Alien: Resurrection, and the film is noteworthy as the one time the DP brought his rich, gonzo sensibility to a big-budget effects-driven piece of IP. Ultimately, the film’s swings keep things interesting, and Weaver is characteristically great and multifaceted. In contrast, none of the characters in Starship Troopers amount to one dimension, which is part of Paul Verhoeven’s satirical point, as he skewers American foreign policy, the military industrial complex, and the ideal soldier.
The Peacemaker and Mouse Hunt
The Lost World, one of a 1997 one-two punch from Steven Spielberg, marked his return to directing after a four-year hiatus following Schindler’s List. That time wasn’t spent idle, producing films through Amblin—including The Flinstones, Casper, and Twister—while also founding studio DreamWorks SKG with animation and music moguls Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen.
The first and third DreamWorks releases were The Peacemaker—a better-than-average (but no Face Off) espionage thriller starring George Clooney and Nicole Kidman—and Mount Hunt, Gore Verbinski’s elevated and stylish version of the slap-schtick perpetrated by John Hughes, with Nathan Lane and Lee Evans struggling to rid their property of the titular rodent. Not an embarrassment of riches, but the studio would produce some strong films in the years to come, almost making up for its nauseating company logo and theme above.
Flubber, A Simple Wish, Hercules and George of the Jungle
As high school unfolded, I was digging deeper and deeper into movies, working my way through the classics with amazing VHS double bills like Scarface and The Deer Hunter, borrowing books on Warren Beatty and Oliver Stone from my council library, and reading an assortment of movie magazines. The very best of these, Neon Magazine—a British lad’s mag-style movie monthly—kicked off in 1997 and ended too soon in 1999; to this day I kick myself for throwing out that collection. You can read chunks of the magazine online at this WordPress.
Despite all this, I still found myself at matinees of kids’ programmers, maybe just because I wanted to watch something. Flubber is a Robin Williams-starring, John Hughes-co-scripted remake of The Absent-Minded Professor, and it bears repeating, for those 80s kids who hold Hughes up as a Salinger-esque recluse and voice of a generation, J.D. Salinger never made bank on scripts where Peter Ustinov fell down a chimney and got sprayed on by a skunk. A Simple Wish is a fairly unmemorable modern fairytale, but affords Kathleen Turner opportunity for some grandiose vamping.
Hercules and George of the Jungle are the best of the quartet. The former hails from the Aladdin creative team of John Musker and Ron Clements, delivering a similarly energetic—if not as uniformly great—family adventure with some great supporting voice work from James Woods and Danny De Vito; the latter has Brendan Fraser making faces and crashing into things in the jungle, which at 42 doesn’t sound especially enticing but at 14–15 hit the spot. Both were a clear shift into “boy’s” territory for Disney following Pocahontas and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.
Dante’s Peak and Volcano
The competing volcanic eruption-themed disaster movies of 1996, both with talented leads (Pierce Brosnan and Linda Hamilton; Tommy Lee Jones and Anne Heche), capable journeymen directors (Roger Donaldson, Mick Jackson), and sufficiently different in look, setting, and tone that watching both doesn’t feel like double-dipping. They are, however, quite mediocre movies.
The Fifth Element and The Jackal
Bruce Willis doesn’t challenge himself much in either of these 1997 releases, but neither feels a particularly safe bet, especially The Fifth Element. A bright, splashy sci-fi fantasy infused with Luc Besson’s populist and very European sensibility, The Fifth Element is terrific fun, and Willis’s low energy is balanced out by Gary Oldman’s Looney Tunes meets Bill Clinton villain and Milla Jovovich and Chris Tucker in their breakout roles. The Jackal, meanwhile, is a watchable update of both novel and film of The Day of the Jackal, with Richard Gere’s Oirish convict tasked with locating Willis’s chameleonic—if you’ve never seen Bruce Willis in your entire life—assassin.
Conspiracy Theory, Air Force One, Copland and Donnie Brasco
If you asked me who my favourite actors were in 1997, it might change a bit from week to week but actors consistently in rotation were Mel Gibson (controversy noted), Harrison Ford, Sylvester Stallone, Robert De Niro, and Al Pacino, all headlining features in 1997. While not one of Richard Donner and Gibson’s best collaborations, and it ultimately runs out of steam, Conspiracy Theory is a lot of fun. In a sign of how times change, Gibson’s character would probably have a YouTube channel with 500,000 followers today. Air Force One, meanwhile, is a serviceable stab at “Die Hard on Air Force One”, with the absolute best actor for that undertaking and a crowd-pleasing finale, but Wolfgang Peterson’s film never quite lives up to its high-concept potential.
James Mangold’s wonderful Copland was a bold pivot for Stallone, leaning back into his Rocky underdog persona but letting himself be heavier and less physically decisive, getting stomped over onscreen by a gruff Harvey Keitel and a swearing, sandwich-eating De Niro. Somewhat similarly, Pacino plays a lower status mobster in Donnie Brasco—Mike Newell’s follow-up to Four Weddings and a Funeral—rather than the confident kingpin of previous fare, delivering nuanced and vulnerable work alongside a similarly strong Johnny Depp.
Bean and Fierce Creatures
My admiration for Rowan Atkinson’s Mr Bean is well-documented, though I contend the simpler the setups for gags the better: Bean simply sitting an exam or going to the swimming pool or a restaurant are gold; the more plot and characters and ‘business’ to navigate, the weaker the episode. So it’s little surprise that Bean—which has a lot of business and at least a third sunk into Peter MacNicol’s professional and family tribulations—doesn’t really work, though I understand the rationale for those choices. On the flip side, Fierce Creatures, though no A Fish Called Wanda, is underrated. Despite its troubled production—initiated under Robert Young, reshot and completed by Fred Schepisi—it’s still enjoyable seeing the lead quartet bounce off one another, and Kline bouncing off himself in dual father and son roles.
Tomorrow Never Dies, Scream 2 and The Saint
Pierce Brosnan’s second Bond outing and the third best film of his run, Tomorrow Never Dies is big and bombastic, constantly moving and eventually tiring, but with a couple of indisputably great set pieces and bolstered by an energetic villain and heroine in Jonathan Pryce and Michelle Yeoh. Scream 2 is less fresh but more polished than Scream, acknowledging and (mostly) navigating its slasher sequel pitfalls. While Phillip Noyce’s adaptation of The Saint—both Leslie Charteris’s novels and the Roger Moore-starring TV series—no doubt had aspirations to The Untouchables and Mission: Impossible-level success and establishing a new franchise for Val Kilmer, this well-made film is amiable programming but never especially enthralling.
Gattaca, Contact and Men in Black
Three smart mainstream science-fiction films, two cerebral, two big-budget, one a lot of fun. Push come shove though, I’d rather rewatch Alien: Resurrection or Starship Troopers.
My Best Friend’s Wedding and Fools Rush In
Two fresh, better than average rom-coms, the former revitalising one star (Julia Roberts) and minting two more (Cameron Diaz, Rupert Everett), the latter set against a then-novel cultural milieu for the genre.
The Assignment and Kiss or Kill
Tonally very different—one very rote Hollywood product, the other very of its moment in Australian film—but both effective smaller genre titles and stylistic antidotes to the dominant films of their genres (e.g. Bond for The Assignment, Natural Born Killers for Kiss or Kill). 1997 was also Frances O’Connor’s breakout year, and she and Matt Day are terrific in Kiss or Kill.
The rest: Midnight in the Garden of Good Will Hunting
Frances O’Connor’s other major role in 1997 was Thank God He Met Lizzie, as a past flame of Richard Roxburgh whose memory haunts his wedding day. Said wedding is to Cate Blanchett, who also broke out this year with both Gilliam Armstrong’s very fine period drama Oscar & Lucinda—opposite import Ralph Fiennes—and Bruce Beresford’s underrated, impeccably cast and crafted POW ensemble drama Paradise Road. Roxburgh pops up in Oscar & Lucinda, as well as Doing Time for Patsy Cline alongside Matt Day and Miranda Otto, the latter also in the entertaining True Love and Chaos and The Well. A great, fertile crop of young Australian talent, most of whom would tumble into Hollywood—with varying success but generally interesting results—over the next few years.
Russell Crowe had already made that leap (see above), but returned home for Heaven’s Burning, a much less artful and nastier crime road movie than Kiss or Kill. While P.J. Hogan followed up Muriel’s Wedding with the abovementioned My Best Friend’s Wedding, The Adventures of Priscilla director Stephan Elliott doubled down on home turf with Welcome to Woop Woop. Broad ‘ocker’ comedies were the default setting for Australian comedies for a stretch of the 1990s, and this was one of the straws that broke the camel’s back: if there was an explosion in an Australian souvenir shop, the town of Woop Woop would be created from the scattered debris. Having said that, the film also posits its boisterous, coarse larrikinism as insidious, and belongs to a tradition of Australian films—from Wake in Fright to Picnic at Hanging Rock to Razorback to Wolf Creek—about the country putting foreigners through the wringer. Also ocker-centric but far more endearing is the big-hearted, very quotable The Castle.
Other 1997 titles from local filmmakers include the droll Road to Nhill, warm Under the Lighthouse Dancing, true-life drama Black Rock—a compassionate and devastating stage adaptation, though for most of its runtime the film feels cinematic, with naturalistic performances and authentic locations and music—and, from an Australian abroad, Jocelyn Moorhouse’s A Thousand Acres. A regional contemporary take on King Lear empathetically focused on Lear’s traditionally unsympathetic daughters, the film elucidates and makes text of Shakespeare’s subtexts. It’s fine.
I touched on four of the Best Picture Oscar nominees above. The fifth, Good Will Hunting, was an effective mainstream pivot for director Gus Van Sant and a writing & acting showcase for young stars Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. Like Dead Poet’s Society or Ordinary People, two clear precursors (not the least in Robin Williams’ casting), the strip-mining of the film’s ingredients over subsequent years—for homage, rip-off, and parodic purposes—leaves it feeling somewhat contrived. I much prefer Damon’s other lead, The Rainmaker, a shaggier and less high-stakes John Grisham adaptation than usual, executed with some panache by Francis Ford Coppola. This production finally put to bed the director’s longstanding debts, and the Coppola of the 2000s through to Megalopolis was an entirely independent artist.
Tackling heavier subject matter were Coppola’s peers Martin Scorsese with Kundun and Steven Spielberg with Amistad: two sincere, finely-burnished historical dramas that I’ve seen only once apiece, compared to most other 1990s titles from these filmmakers. There’s a case to be made that these directors shouldn’t have made these films, but those cultural considerations were less pervasive in the 1990s, and I suspect they were precisely the guys who could make those films at their cost, scale, and level of polish.
Both Spielberg films of 1997 were shot by Janusz Kaminski, cementing their partnership following Schindler’s List, with Kaminski shooting every Spielberg film thereafter and becoming a key recurring collaborator alongside composer John Williams and editor Michael Kahn. While there are some Spielberg/Kaminski films in the 2000s I don’t care for aesthetically (e.g. Crystal Skull), it’s hard to argue theirs isn’t one of the strongest creative partnerships of the past three decades.
Paul Schrader also delivered a fairly uneven one-two punch with the trivial Touch and compelling gut-punch Affliction, featuring some of Nick Nolte’s very best work before tipping into self-parody in the 2000s. Clint Eastwood followed suit with a one-for-them in political thriller Absolute Power and one-for-me/nobody in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Not to be outdone, Oliver Stone followed Nixon with a hybrid one-for-them/me/nobody in U-Turn, a sweaty desert noir with Sean Penn stuck in a dusty town, seduced by Jennifer Lopez, and menaced by the likes of Nick Nolte, Billy Bob Thornton, Powers Boothe, and Joaquin Phoenix.
Ostensibly a commercial play but delivered in Stone’s increasingly distracting style, there are things to like in U-Turn, just nobody onscreen. Lower-budget, less-starry titles have played in this sandbox more nimble, and for a filmmaker with so much to say U-Turn is weirdly about nothing. While Spielberg and Kaminski were at the beginning of their beautiful friendship, U-Turn marked Stone’s final collaboration with DP Robert Richardson after a volatile but incredibly fruitful decade, and Stone’s subsequent films lost some of their electricity without this key player.
Lost Highway, another desert noir from a veteran director with a femme fatale and scuzzy supporting cast, feels like a similarly commercial play—especially with its uncharacteristically contemporary soundtrack—for David Lynch following the wholesale rejection of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. However, it’s a more successful and satisfying work overall, alternately lush and creepy and evocative and confounding. Watch the Lost Highway opening here.
Three more industry veterans chalking up credits in 1997 were Woody Allen, Ridley Scott, and Adrian Lyne. Deconstructing Harry is an amusing and intriguingly angry, misanthropic Allen film. The actor-director has long deflected and obfuscated claims his films are autobiographical, and I don’t contend his onscreen persona and his offscreen self are one and the same, but this film feels, if not autobiographical in detail, at least emotionally authentic in its bitterness compared to the forced whimsy of its preceding post-Mia Farrow titles (i.e. Everyone Says I Love You, Mighty Aphrodite).
Ridley Scott wouldn’t become as prolific as Allen until the 21st century, and while not quite averaging a film a year, that’s excusable given his films involve rugged location shoots, special effects, large casts, and in the case of GI Jane, marines, military hardware, combat sequences, and the impressive physical transformation of star Demi Moore. Underrated and effective, I would gladly swap the financial fortunes of Striptease and GI Jane, the former perplexingly but understandably successful, the latter understandably but perplexingly unsuccessful.
Finally, Scott’s fellow British visual stylist Adrian Lyne delivered Lolita, boldly following in Kubrick’s footsteps and executing a more authentic, more artful but less witty take on the material. The film is inescapably difficult and disquieting viewing, but also compelling. I love that Jeremy Irons cashed his blank cheque following The Lion King and Die Hard With a Vengeance on this project, and while he’d transition into more of a jobbing carpetbagger in its wake—The Man with the Iron Mask, Dungeons & Dragons, and The Time Machine would all follow—he delivers suitably tormented, nuanced work here.
1997 marked the final films of two veteran directors: Carl Reiner with That Old Feeling and Alan Pakula with The Devil’s Own. Reiner’s film benefits from some unexpectedly lethal comedy chemistry from Bette Midler and Dennis Farina; it’s schticky, but fun. The Devil’s Own is another thriller where Harrison Ford encounters the IRA ala Patriot Games, here in the form of houseguest Brad Pitt, another Hollywood hunk delivering an Oirish accent ala The Jackal. A product of a fraught production, it’s not particularly memorable, but still an efficient and solid final work from a director who delivered some solid to very good uncondescending thrillers for adult moviegoers over the decade—Presumed Innocent, Consenting Adults, The Pelican Brief—with a deeper bench of classics including Klute, The Parallax View, and All the President’s Men. I’m sorry we didn’t get more films from Pakula, including more potential collaborations between him and Ford, given the actor’s predilection for working with the same filmmakers again: see also Mike Nichols, Sydney Pollock etc.
Alongside these swansongs, several rising filmmakers made their third films, all great. At the time, David Fincher’s The Game and Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown were perceived as disappointments after the success and cultural import of sophomore films Seven and Pulp Fiction. Time hasn’t been as kind to Fincher’s film, and tug the thread enough and it falls apart narratively, but the film has plenty of style, agreeable gallows humour, and a terrific Michael Douglas performance.
In contrast, Jackie Brown has aged like the finest of wines. Initially dismissed as just ‘another’ QT crime film, albeit lower-energy and more indulgent, the film feels fresher today as Tarantino has gravitated further away from that LA crime milieu, and Jackie Brown’s assured command of pace and tone are more evident. More than a Blaxpoitation riff, it’s a film about ageing, the chinks in the armour that accumulate with the passage of time, and how what it means to grow older varies according to gender, class, and race. The film provides rich showcases for Pam Grier and Robert Forster, as well as wonderful vital work from Bridget Fonda before she vanished from screens, Michael Keaton before his lengthy career slump, Robert De Niro before his protracted but profitable career slump, and Samuel L. Jackson before caricature calcified. Kevin Smith’s third film Chasing Amy is similarly a maturer work than Clerks or Mallrats, but also charmingly naive and earnest in how it grapples with and sometimes fumbles its subject matter.
Two filmmakers made very different sophomore films about the adult film industry. Boogie Nights is Paul Thomas Anderson’s well-crafted, big-hearted portrait of the industry’s boom in the 70s and decline in the 80s seen through the eyes of one filmmaking family, with Burt Reynolds and Mark Wahlberg—both of whom would subsequently turn on the film, despite it showcasing some of their best work—as the filmmaking family patriarch and adopted turned prodigal son respectively. Meanwhile, Orgazmo, Trey Parker’s follow-up to Cannibal: The Musical, is a diverting comedy about a Mormon who unexpectedly becomes a porn superstar.
Also delivering his second feature—discounting films that he effectively co- or ghost-directed—was Kevin Costner with The Postman. Costner’s audaciousness in delivering a second large-scale, post-apocalyptic dystopian thriller in as many years after the fiscal woes of Waterworld is hard to dispute, but even as a documented Costner apologist I find this one unengaging.
Playwright Neil La Bute made his screen debut with In the Company of Men, about two yuppies who romantically string along a deaf woman, not unlike cats playing with their food. The film’s roots in both stage and 90s indie production are evident, but La Bute’s misanthropic worldview finds perhaps its purest distillation here, with Aaron Eckhart delivering an admirably unsympathetic star-minting performance.
Amidst the assortment of films from veteran and rising auteurs discussed above, there were also plenty of programmers, particularly comedy and family titles with familiar faces doing familiar things: Bill Murray stumbles into spy games in The Man Who Knew Too Little; Leslie Nielsen stumbles blindly into hijinks in Mr Magoo; Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau go cruising (not that type of cruising) in Out to Sea; Chevy Chase takes the family to Las Vegas in National Lampoon’s Vegas Vacation; Tim Allen reunites with his long-lost jungle-dwelling offspring in Jungle to Jungle and goes Amish with Kirsty Alley in For Richer or Poorer; Martin Lawrence and Tim Robbins are mismatched criminals in Nothing to Lose; Christina Ricci headlines Disney remake That Darn Cat; and Chris Farley is puppy dog amusing and endearing in his final film Beverly Hills Ninja, though I suspect it would not hold up as fondly if another half dozen similar titles followed.
Alongside these were some darker-edged, better-than-they-should-be low to mid-budget studio comedies that have cultivated cult followings, like hitman comedy Grosse Point Blank, buddy picture Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion, ex-stalking rom-com Addicted to Love, and the still very entertaining—before its sequels overdosed on their own supply—Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery.
It’s fascinating to see the mix of old and recent SNL alum in this list, some like Farley and Mike Myers succeeding, others like Chase and Murray flailing—though Murray would reset spectacularly with Rushmore the next year—and Dan Aykroyd doing excellent supporting work in Grosse Point Blank but no longer leading vehicles, a deal cemented with his Blues Brothers sequel the following year. Looking at the list, I completely understand why the likes of Adam Sandler and Eddie Murphy have in recent years switched to working entirely in comfortable streaming cocoons, where they can continue to headline big-budget projects and preserve their star status without having to test their box office credentials in the unforgiving theatrical market.
To this day, I’m undecided whether I like In and Out: I don’t find Frank Oz’s teacher-gets-outed comedy particularly funny, but Kevin Kline, working comfortably in his pocket, makes even the most middling of mainstream studio comedies appealing. Meanwhile, seeing Kline and Sigourney Weaver headlining The Ice Storm alongside In and Out and Alien: Resurrection attests to the opportunities still available in the 90s for classy adult dramas made with studio heft as well as opportunities for well-liked actors to straddle both populist and prestige projects (spare a thought for the likes of Chris Evans, a charismatic actor and fine human specimen trapped in a spiral of anonymous streaming faux-blockbusters and occasional, even more anonymous streaming dramas).
On The Ice Storm, director Ang Lee takes what could be overwrought, melodramatic dysfunctional family drama and executes the material with an assured steady hand and dissects it with a calm anthropological eye. Dysfunctional families are also portrayed, more empathetically but less memorably, in Inventing the Abbotts and Ulee’s Gold, the latter enriched by an understated, exquisite late career performance by Peter Fonda.
Richard Gere and Brad Pitt’s Oirish-accented IRA alum were part of a wave of IRA-centric films of the 90s, with Hollywood pilfering the freedom fight for repentant heroes (like Gere and Pitt) and less repentant villains (Sean Bean in Patriot Games, Tommy Lee Jones in Blown Away). Thankfully, some actual Irish filmmakers like Neil Jordan and Jim Sheridan got to grapple with the struggle (The Crying Game, Michael Collins, In the Name of the Father). Sheridan’s The Boxer features regular collaborator Daniel Day-Lewis as a former freedom fighter pursuing a boxing career, while Jordan’s The Butcher Boy focuses on a disturbed youth who menaces his community. I haven’t watched either title in a quarter century, so cannot speak to either with any authority, but would wager they’re more authentic portraits of the twentieth-century Irish experience than Blown Away.
The long tail of Scream was just beginning in 1997 with the abovementioned Scream 2, but also I Know What You Did Last Summer, a more meat & veg slasher title from the same screenwriter. The tail of Seven was evident in Kiss the Girls, casting Morgan Freeman as airport thriller hero Alex Cross, teaming with Ashley Judd to find a kidnapper killer. Like Copycat, Kiss the Girls rode its comparisons to some success, but is mostly forgettable. More compelling—but hard to watch—is anime thriller Perfect Blue from the late Satoshi Kon. 1997 also saw a stampede of monster movies, including Anaconda, The Relic, Mimic, and the inconsequential An American Werewolf in Paris, and effects-heavy genre titles Event Horizon and Spawn, the latter a CGI-heavy dark superhero headache and one of the last titles riding the long tail of Batman before the genre’s reinvention. In The Devil’s Advocate, Al Pacino channels all the energy and ham conserved on Donnie Brasco, while in Snow White: A Tale of Terror, Sigourney Weaver—omnipresent in 1997—gives Pacino a run for his money.
Con Air and Face Off set a very high bar for action movies in 1997, while Air Force One elevated the “Die Hard in X” premise to higher office and altitude. Firmly attached to the ground, however, was the effective road thriller Breakdown, a tense, sturdy blend of Frantic and Dual featuring JT Walsh’s last screen performance and one of Kurt Russell’s last and best Everyman action hero leads. Metro was a brief and likeable return to action-comedy for Eddie Murphy before tripling down on family entertainment for the next decade; Shadow Conspiracy was journeyman George P. Cosmatos’ final feature; and Seagal put out Fire Down Below. Double Team was Van-Damme’s third collaboration with a Hong Kong import director after Hard Target and Maximum Risk, here working with Tsui Hark, paired onscreen with Dennis Rodman, and pitted against Mickey Rourke in the Colosseum. Suffice to say, it has its moments.
Like Sigourney Weaver, playwright, screenwriter, and director David Mamet was omnipresent in 1997, directing The Spanish Prisoner, scripting The Edge, and co-scripting Wag the Dog. The Spanish Prisoner is an entirely performance- and script-driven thriller: there are no car or foot chases, no dramatic showdowns, nothing to get the heart racing, just smart writing, precise filmmaking, and impeccable (if Mamet-affected) acting, including Steve Martin in an anomalous deadpan serious turn.
Survival thriller The Edge is more muscular and set-piece-driven, albeit not really the Anthony Hopkins/Alec Baldwin slugfest sold by the above trailer. Alongside Once Were Warriors and Mulholland Falls, New Zealand director Lee Tamahori was building an impressive filmography, albeit one that went very wobbly, very quickly in the 2000s. So too did Barry Levinson’s ouevre, but his 1990s run of making big-budget, star-driven, adult-focused studio films was still going relatively strong, and Wag the Dog is one of the best, boosted by a sharp script and Dustin Hoffman’s indulgent but fairly savvy Robert Evans impersonation as a Hollywood creative approached to engineer a fake war to deflect attention from a Presidency-toppling scandal (in hindsight, a very naïve premise).
Other films with things on their mind, but varying degrees of success in articulating them, included another Hoffman film, Costa Gavras’s Mad City, about the media circus surrounding a hostage situation perpetrated by a disgruntled ex-employee (John Travolta); Red Corner, another vehicle for Richard Gere as a businessman standing trial for murder in China, capably helmed by Jon Avnet; and Rosewood, a meaty and challenging historical drama starring Ving Rhames and Jon Voight about a racial massacre in 1920s Florida. Like The Edge and Tamahori, Rosewood offers a glimpse into a very different career trajectory for director John Singleton, who became a proficient if anonymous action filmmaker in the 2000s.
Danny Boyle, and to a degree British cinema, might also have taken a very different direction had Boyle and Ewan McGregor’s director-star partnership continued beyond A Life Less Ordinary. Another third film, A Life Less Ordinary is one of those titles well outside the critical orthodoxy that I nonetheless adore, reeled in by its intangible hooks; I don’t subscribe to the terms ‘guilty pleasure’ or ‘so bad it’s good’, but this probably fits those bills. I love the movie more than objectively better Boyle films, as well as objectively better films of its ilk. I love its tonally awry hodgepodge of road movie, romance, comedy, thriller, 30s screwball, and 90s grunge. I love the dynamic between Ewan McGregor and Cameron Diaz, even though the former’s sartorial style is so of the moment it was passé the minute the camera stopped rolling. I love the soundtrack and gallery of classy supporting freaks, including Holly Hunter, Delroy Lindo, Dan Hedaya, and Ian Holm, and even though I recognise the film is a conceptual whiff, it’s a creative and charming one.
This was the film—more than Trainspotting or Star Wars—where McGregor became, much like Crowe and Pearce, a guy I followed with great interest and investment, sometimes disproportionate to the quality of his work and sometimes amply rewarded for that brand loyalty. Boyle and McGregor’s parting of ways over McGregor’s non-casting in The Beach was acrimonious, and they wouldn’t collaborate again until 2017’s T2: Trainspotting. I love their partnership and am glad they buried the hatchet, after burying it into each other for 20 years. While I’m sorry for collaborations that didn’t happen in that time, I’m also wary of a sliding doors universe without Slumdog Millionaire or 127 Hours, and wager A Life Less Ordinary was as far as they could have taken their particular brand of Cool Britannia.
While I haven’t seen too many of the children of Trainspotting that would hatch over the next few years (Twin Town, The Acid House, Human Traffic), I have seen Preaching to the Perverted, a rather Uncool Britannia comedy best described as Carry on S&M. The reliable British heritage drama also bore new titles in 1997, all characteristically preoccupied with class and/or romance, including the McGregor-starring The Serpent’s Kiss, the stylish Wings of the Dove—Helena Bonham-Carter’s last film of this type before letting her freak flag fly—and Her Majesty Mrs Brown, teaming director John Madden and star Judi Dench one year before Shakespeare in Love.
Also hailing from Albion were The Winter Guest, Alan Rickman’s eccentric directorial debut; Jean Reno-starring comedy Roseanna’s Grave, lightweight but likeable; and Welcome to Sarajevo, the resourceful Michael Winterbottom’s contemporary follow-up to the previous year’s heritage drama Jude. Winterbottom’s pivot served as an announcement—if only clearly in retrospect—that here was a director who followed his own muse, and indeed spent the next quarter century making whatever he wanted, however he wanted.
Major foreign releases of the year included Almodovar’s Live Flesh, featuring Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem, which applied his characteristic panache and kink to very British source material by crime author Ruth Rendell; Open Your Eyes, Alejandro Amenabar’s trippy mystery drama, also starring Cruz and later remade by Cruise, again featuring Cruz, as Vanilla Sky; Takashi Kitano’s Hana Bi, the title that broke Kitano internationally, though I prefer his blunter earlier work; and Life is Beautiful, a warm wartime comedy about a father’s efforts to shield his son from the realities of a concentration camp. While the film’s reputation has taken hits with time—in part due to director-star Roberto Benigni’s unsuccessful follow-up film Pinocchio, his only briefly charming antics at the Academy Awards, and I suspect the Academy’s collective remorse for awarding him Best Actor over some career-best work from Nick Nolte (Affliction) and Edward Norton and Ian McKellen (American History X and Gods and Monsters, both covered in my pending 1998 piece)—the film itself remains very endearing.
Life is Beautiful was one of Pope John Paul II’s favourite films. I suspect The Apostle, from director-star Robert Duvall, would not digest as smoothly, either for the Pontiff or most viewers, but it’s a quite remarkable portrait of how flawed, broken, corrupted, complicated people can nonetheless be pillars of faith and vessels for others’ salvation. Seven Years in Tibet, based on the true story of an Austrian mountaineer’s relationship with the Dalai Lama, is from the always-interesting Jean-Jacques Annaud and may have had profundity in its sights, but the casting of Brad Pitt—which guaranteed its scale and lavishness of production—ultimately renders it a handsome film in which Pitt looks handsome in grand locations and adopts an Austrian accent that makes his Oirish accent sound Day-Lewis-level authentic.
I’ll end this piece, as I did 1996, with an inelegant dump of unrelated titles, some quite good, starting with TV movies Dying to Belong—in which Hilary Swank endures deadly fraternity initiations—and The Second Civil War, a HBO-produced, Joe Dante-directed slice of political speculation that I suspect feels less far-fetched today; family films The Borrowers and Fairy Tale: A True Story, the latter featuring Peter O’Toole as Arthur Conan Doyle and, improbably, Harvey Keitel as Harry Houdini; Bill Duke’s Harlem-set period gangster flick Hoodlum, starring the very 90s cast of Laurence Fishburne, Tim Roth, and Andy Garcia, which would probably make for an entertaining double bill with 1996’s Last Man Standing; Private Parts, an engaging biopic of radio shock jock Howard Stern featuring Stern as himself and Paul Giamatti in his screen debut; Billie August’s Nordic-set thriller Smilla’s Sense of Snow, featuring Julia Ormond in the last major role of her 1990s stardom; and Kids screenwriter Harmony Korine’s gross directorial debut Gummo.
For the record, some notable films of 1996 that I have not included because I haven’t seen them: Twelve Angry Men (TV), Henry Fool, She’s So Lovely, Spice World, Happy Together, Funny Games, Cube, Money Talks, Picture Perfect, Nightwatch, McHale’s Navy, Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, Suicide Kings, Truth or Consequences, Murder at 1600, One Night Stand, The Beautician and the Beast, Fever Pitch, Gone Fishing, Father’s Day, Excess Baggage, Buddy, Kull, Twin Town, 187, Air Bud.
If you’re still here, thanks for enduring and see you back here for 1998, when I stopped going to the cinema but they kept on releasing movies, including duelling asteroid movies, duelling animated ant movies, a pair or Elizabethan romps, Terence Malick’s remarkable return to filmmaking, and a science-fiction noir masterwork. To be continued …