For example, In the Name of the Father featured great performances from Daniel Day Lewis (shocker) and Koboyashi, but honestly, that’s about all I remember. I certainly don’t recall debating the movie in any manner that approached “you gotta see this movie” excitement or “you’re nuts, that movie blows” bewilderment. Yes, it was nominated for 7 Oscars, but I honestly don’t remember that much about the movie and the desire to see it again has never crept into my brain since my first viewing.

And what about The Professional? I liked it. I really did, but I never embraced it. In fact, over the years, working in movie theatres and video stores, I have debated this movie with co-workers, and have come away thinking I saw a different movie than they saw. I wish I loved it, but…sorry, I just don’t, and I’m tired of the debate because it always ends with, “You need to see the director’s cut,” which I will never do. Director’s cuts are boring non-events, I grew tired of them upon the re-release of the “Ultimate Remastered Double Official Director’s Cut of Blade Runner.” There’s really no need for me to debate The Professional anymore, least of all on the Internet, where there is no such thing as a matter of opinion. I’m comfortable being wrong about it.

And what about The Shawshank Redemption? Great movie, but hasn’t it been fawned over and elevated in stature ad nauseum (that still doesn’t seem like a real term to me, but I looked it up!)? We get it, it underperformed, nearly everyone discovered it on video or cable – a fact that in my opinion, adds to the consensus opinion of the movie. Who doesn’t like to be completely surprised by a movie they only rented or caught on TNT? The movie’s poor theatrical performance could have made my case for 1994 being the best year ever – it was such a great year that this great crowd pleaser slipped through the cracks – but it doesn’t, because I was wrong. See evidence below.

Here are the reasons why 1994 was no way near the best year ever:

Reality Bites: Ben Stiller’s  attempt to define a generation is simultaneously hypocritical and irony free. There’s a message about commercialism and not selling out, but every time someone has a beer in the movie, it’s a Rolling Rock! I have nothing against selling out, I think it’s an overused term, but don’t preach to me about it and then do it. I knew brooding slackers like Ethan Hawke’s character in college, and Stiller’s movie portrays aspects of these guys pretty accurately. For example, a certain segment of the college girl population threw themselves at guys like Ethan Hawke’s character in the 90’s. It didn’t feel unrealistic that Winona Ryder would choose him over Stiller’s nice guy corporate climber, it just felt like we’re supposed to praise her for making the wrong choice.  By the time she chooses Hawke, it doesn’t really matter, because Ryder’s character has lost us with her ridiculous and petty temper tantrum over Stiller’s treatment of her pwecious wittle home movies. Oh, and I remember this being one of the first movies where they decide to throw in a gay character under the pretense that they’re exploring something deep. But they weren’t.

The Rosie O’Donnell Trifecta: I hate the Razzie’s and all they stand for, but they might have nailed it in 1994, dishing out awards to Rosie for the three following stains on the boxers of the movie gods.

The Flintstones: With a domestic haul of $131 Million, The Flintstones is the big touché to the above Shawshank defense that 1994 is the best year ever.

Exit to Eden: Manages to make Dana Delaney’s hotness simultaneously embarrassing and boring.

Car 54, Where Are You?: I heard a guy robbed a bank in Iowa with a simple threat to play this movie on a continuous loop in the lobby. His thumb at the ready on the remote, he supposedly screamed, “No alarms! Don’t make me push play! I’ll do it!”

Interview With a Vampire: I don’t remember hating this movie, the reformed Christian’s whining about the casting of Tom Cruise as Lestat and subsequent about face upon seeing the movie felt as phony as Dino in The Flintstones.

When a Man Loves a Woman: It was his fault she was a raging drunk. Riiiiiiiiight.

Nell: Chicka chicka chickabay. Roughly translated, that means, “I’m not happy with two Oscars, and would really like a third.”

Ready to Wear: “You think I’m kidding! I will push play! No dye packs! No money off the bottom of the till!!!”

There are more, of course. Clearly, I overestimated the output of movies in 1994, or I was wrong. I think it’s the latter, and so does everyone else. Nice year for movies, but not the best ever.

So what year was?

 
—–

Jeremy Piven is at his pre-Ari Gold best as Droz, something like a seventh year senior at Port Chester University college who is the unofficial leader of a group of campus misfits who live in a former fraternity house known as The Pit.

It’s a former frat house because fraternities have been banned from PCU, and the residents of The Pit are misfits because they are, gasp, regular people.

They are a collection of individuals, completely at odds with campus groups whose bonds are the result of a supposed shared identity, i.e., the radical feminists (the Womynists), the rich white guys (Balls and Shaft). Navigating the campus requires moving through a maze of protests and counter protests. The college president, Ms. Garcia-Thompson, is obsessed with multiculturalism and diversity, at one point suggesting that the Bi-Sexual Asian Studies program should have its own building on campus. The irony is, of course, that the denizens of the Pit are the most diverse group on campus.

This is pretty funny, relevant stuff, but the movie never becomes hilarious. Port Chester University is based on Wesleyan University, a ripe target for satire, but the story never really rises above good-natured ribbing. Droz schools Tom, “These, Tom, are the Causeheads. They find a world-threatening issue and stick with it for about a week,”  and then abandons him, but by the end, Tom decides he wants to come to PCU and live in the Pit.

David Spade oozes smarm and entitlement as Rand McPherson, the leader of Balls and Shaft. Jon Favreau is amusing as a paranoid stoner. The weak link is Tom, a bland protagonist who is pretty much just…there.

Like”Entourage,” the movie is at its best when it allows Piven to cut loose:

“I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but there actually was music recorded before 1989.”

“You’re wearing the t-shirt of the band you’re going to see? Don’t be. That guy.”

“We need kegs. Multiple, cold, and domestic.”

Ultimately, the movie boils down to a “Let’s whip this place into shape and put on a show!” finale that felt fresher when Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo stole the idea. Worse, the wackadoo groups on campus mobilize and realize their true shared enemy is none other than…Conservative White Men! This predictable turn mars everything that’s come before it, but the movie is still worth renting for a chuckle or two.

Weigh in below, bearing in mind that in coming up with movies to write about, I’ve come to realize that while I had fun at the movies in 1994, calling it the best year ever is not hyperbole. Indeed,  it’s horseshit, for reasons I will cover in my final column on the subject next week.

It was a modestly budgeted studio action movie, but without the expectations that accompanied that summer’s “Clear and Present Danger” or “True Lies.” For most of the college kids I knew, Johnny Utah Keanu Reeves was a bit of a head scratcher, oddly turning up in such artsy critically acclaimed fare such as “Much Ado About Nothing” and “My Own Private Idaho,” very rarely looking comfortable with the dialogue he was charged with reciting in his surfer-bro monotone.

But the movie had a few secret weapons, and what do you know? It was and remains pretty close to great, and word of mouth propelled it to smash hit status. Tarantino quoted the movie at the MTV movie awards the following year, and the unhip had suddenly become hip. First and foremost of these secret weapons is the script by Graham Yost, one of my favorite current geniuses/guys-I-hate-because-they’re-so-good, thanks to his work on FX’s “Justified.”

 The first twenty to thirty minutes of the movie, a tense hostage/bomb situation on a skyscraper elevator, dispel the nutshell description of the film. And by the time That Tod Keanu Reeves (as Jack Traven, as in, “We will call you Jack Travern, and you will be a cop.”) exits a sticky situation involving mad-bomber Dennis Hopper and a hostage, who happens to also be a cop and Jack’s mentor, by shooting the cop/hostage/mentor – we know we’re in the hands of great storytellers. Furthermore, two other secret weapons have been revealed in the casting: Jeff Daniels as the mentor, Detective Harry Temple, and the late, great Republican Dennis Hopper as the mad bomber, Howard Payne.

“Guts’ll get you so far, and then they’ll get you killed,” Detective Harry Temple (“You will solve crimes and dispense quotable advice.”), tells Jack as they celebrate their apparent victory over Payne, who they believe was killed. Soon, Jack is testing the limits of Harry’s advice on a bus careening all over the ridiculous Los Angeles freeway system. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

As with all of my favorite movies, there’s a smaller moment, not necessarily crucial to the plot, that occurs early in the film that sells me on it. In “Speed,” it’s when Jack enters a coffee shop and knows the bus driver who’s exiting at the same time. To me, it gives the movie a personal touch that reverberates when Payne resurfaces and blows that driver’s bus to smithereens. This explosion could have just been an explosion, but Jack knows the driver and therefore we feel like we know the driver. Payne calls Jack, lays out the rules of the game: Bomb on a bus. Bus hits 50 mph, bomb is activated. Bus dips below 50 mph, smithereens. Jack takes off to find the bus before Payne can finish a sentence (I love that shit!). At this point, it occurs to me that one of the movie’s perceived liabilities may just be a secret weapon.

About Keanu Reeves and his body of work up to this point: Reeves is for me an example of how actors used to be cultivated and primed until they were ready for stardom. Tom Cruise didn’t headline event movies right out of the gate. Same with Keanu, who admittedly went an artier and more independent route than Cruise. Big parts in small movies (“My Own Private Idaho”), small parts in big movies (“Parenthood”), studio niche or genre films (“Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure”), and a big part in a fairly big studio movie (“Point Break”), all led to “Speed.”

As of June 10, 1994, Reeves was a recognizable face, if not a household name. All of the above movies had played on cable for a few years, and we were used to him, he wasn’t jammed down our throats as the it boy. Katherine Bigalow’s “Point Break” let audiences know he could handle playing a cop. He’s not great in that movie, but he’s largely believable due to his athleticism. And college kids mocked his voice, but most people recognized his obvious screen presence. He wasn’t a star yet, but regular people saw his face on the poster and said, “Hey, I know who that is, I think I kind of liked him in that thing I saw him in.” The timing of Reeves’ rise was one of “Speed’s” secret weapons, and the movie is his “Top Gun.”

The final secret weapon in the movie’s arsenal is the casting of then largely unknown Sandra Bullock as Annie Porter (“You will embody hotness and girl-next-door approachability for all of your days.”), the passenger whose penchant for speeding citations has necessitated her frequent use of L.A.’s public transit system (I say largely because I knew her face from repeated viewings of “Love Potion Number 9” on Cinemax, a movie my roommate got me and our other roommates hooked on purely because of Sandra Bullock’s hotness in it, but whose name we never bothered to read in the credits because we were lazy.) Bullock character knows nearly everyone on the bus, they’re a kind of commuting family, another great touch.

 It’s not just Sandra, though, or Keanu, or Hopper or Daniels. They’re as good as they are because of Graham Yost (I hate you! No wait, I love you!). I don’t mean to shortchange Jan De Bont. He does a great job here, but his subsequent work has not lived up to “Speed”, and I have to give the bulk of the credit to his screenwriter, that horrible evil awesome stupendous Graham Yost, whose name I curse and bow down to.

The movie works on a kinetic level because of De Bont. The second act bounces back and forth between Jack keeping order on the speeding bus, with Annie behind the wheel, Harry trying to figure out the identity of the mad bomber back at the station, and a team of cops who have pulled alongside the bus on a flatbed trailer, under the command of Captain McMahon (“You will mediate between the gung-ho thrill seeking cop and the cerebral thinking man’s cop”), played by Joe Morton (Secret weapon!).

Yost’s script is filled with humor, tension, and its plot turns in ways that would be completely predictable in the hands of a lesser writer. Harry, the brains behind the operation, is killed in a bomb blast. According to the mechanics of storytelling, of course he dies. Of course he dies because there’s no way for his advice to be put to the test unless he dies. But we don’t really see it coming, and I think it’s because dude already got shot, by Jack (“You fuck. You shot me!”) at the beginning of the movie, and we subconsciously expect his suffering to be over.

The genius of Harry’s advice, and Yost allowing it to function as a big theme of the movie, is that it allows the hero to get away with failure. The hero should fail. Over and over again, he should fail. But what most action movies get wrong, is that they allow the hero to fail but their failures often feel more like the results of stupid decisions. We often forgive these moves because they advance the plot, but on some level we know that dumb moves sacrifice character. The hero should fail and fail huge, and it should be when his back is totally against the wall and he has no choice but to make a move that’s potentially stupid. 

In the case of Jack Travern, he fails with his back against a horizontal wall of concrete speeding underneath him at a blistering pace. Desperate to steady himself, he punctures the gas tank. When he’s back on the bus, the passengers smell gas, he breaks the news to them, and we can see it on a couple of the passengers’ faces: Dumb move, bro. But it wasn’t. It was the only move. It served character (Jack has to get smarter if he’s going to beat the mad bomber) and plot (We’re running out of gas…and fast!).

I walked away from “Speed” in 1994, having caught a sneak preview with my wife at the General Cinema Theatre at the Georgia Square Mall in Athens (Curse you, rolling rocking red vinyl chairs! Curse you!), feeling like I had seen a nearly perfect action movie. My friends said me and my wife were insane: It’s got that dude that ruined “Dracula,” half-loved the premise, half thought it was the stupidest premise they had ever heard of. But all of them went to see it and agreed that it was a great movie. In subsequent viewings, I have grown less fond of the ending, in which the action moves from the bus to a subway. It’s tense, exciting, and well-executed, but it feels like the stakes have been lowered significantly. The slight let-down of this sequence isn’t nearly enough to derail the movie, however, and it remains as superior an example of how to write, cast, direct, and sell an action movie as “Speed 2: Cruise Control” remains an example of how not to do all of the above.

“Speed” symbolizes the greatness of 1994 because it was something of a sleeper. I’m not suggesting that no one was looking forward to it, or that it was some kind of niche film that found its way. It was a second-tier action movie, designed to sell popcorn, but in exceeding its expectations, it became a huge hit, grossing $121 million domestically.

The movie was released by 20th Century Fox, and had an estimated budget of $25 million. Fox’s other big action movie that summer was “True Lies,” which had a budget of $120 million and made $146 million domestically. Clearly, “Speed” over performed. There are good years and bad years for movies, from the point of view of commerce and quality. In the good years, I believe Hollywood creates more commercially and artistic successful sleepers than in the leaner years.

At the time, I loved that the movie had inspired such debate. The conservative crowd pointed out that Forrest’s beloved Jenny, in her relentless pursuit of pleasures of the flesh, was left with an incurable disease (AIDS, presumably, though the movie never explicitly confirms this assumption). Liberals pointed out the compassion Forrest showed his Jenny upon hearing of her disease was confirmation of the film’s liberal message.

The flaw in this liberal point of view is that it sees the conservative take on Jenny’s life as lacking in compassion. It confuses the problem with the solution. The conservative take is rooted in fact: Jenny did run around, take drugs, sleep with any swinging Dick who would have her. Pointing out Forrest’s heroic compassion to her situation doesn’t erase the reality of how she got in the situation to begin with.

It’s a conservative movie, no question about it.

Neither Jenny nor Forrest experience an easy childhood. Forrest has a spine as “crooked as a politician” leaving him confined to leg braces. Jenny has an abusive father. It turns out that Forrest has an uncanny ability to run, which gets him into college on a football scholarship. Did Bear Bryant’s compassion to Forrest’s academic deficiencies stem from a liberal mindset? I doubt it. Winning ballgames subbing in for the profit motive led to Bryant’s decision. Jenny, too, goes to college, and has dreams of being a big star. Whether she pursues these dreams to the fullest extent of her abilities is unclear, but their derailment appears to be the result of her inability to get out of her own way. Oh, and she picks bad men, including one abusive lout who calls Forrest, the Vietnam Vet, a “Babykiller.” He also badmouths a Democrat, Lyndon B. Johnson, but still, something tells me homeboy didn’t cast a vote for Nixon.

After Vietnam, Forrest holds true to his word and buys a shrimping boat. But, lo and behold, shrimping is not as easy as returning kickoffs for the Tide. Does Forrest quit? Or wallow? He works harder, and an act of God helps him to become successful in the shrimping business. So, he blows all his money on booze and hookers and hires Van Halen to perform at his birthday party – no wait. With the help of his friend, Lieutenant Dan (Gary Sinise, who was nominated for an Academy Award), he invests the money and becomes rich.

Obviously, “Forrest Gump” is a fable, not to be taken literally. Forrest is a simpleton whose values run deep. For much of the film, Forrest lacks self-awareness. He treats people the way he wants to be treated, and doesn’t expect anything from anyone. When a Drill Sergeant asks why he disassembled a rifle so quickly, his response, “Because you told me to, Drill Sergeant,” sounds almost like a question. What other reason would he do it?

The result of this lack of self-awareness is a character that doesn’t feel real for much of the film. But there is a moment, when Jenny rejects him for the forty-eleventh time, when he says, “I’m not a smart man, but I do know what love is.” His self-awareness surfaces again when he learns he has a son. Choking back tears, his voice trails off before he can finish asking if the boy is stupid like him. I think that without these two scenes, the movie would not have enjoyed as much success or raked in the Oscars.

In these moments we connect with Forrest, the conservative hero of the movie.

That was the best year for movies that I can recall. That summer alone we had “Forrest Gump,” “True Lies,” “Speed,” and everyone was eagerly awaiting the arrival of Cannes winner “Pulp Fiction.” And we also had “The Lion King.” I remember the critic for my campus newspaper, The Red & Black (Go Dawgs!), panned the film, noting that the “Circle of Life” song, sung by a gay man, was really about keeping groups of people, particularly minorities, in their place. I thought this was bizarre and brought it up with some of my classmates.

I was a drama major. Hellooooo! What was I thinking!

Turns out the movie was homophobic and racist. Scar, the villain, was clearly gay, I was told. I missed that. By missing it, i.e. not having an opinion on the sexual preference of a cartoon lion, I was also a homophobe. Huh? As for the charge of racism, the hyenas, famously voiced by Cheech Marin and Whoopi Goldberg, were stereotypes of blacks and Mexicans. But, as I pointed out, James Earl Jones, a black man, voiced the role of Mufasa. The response still floors me: Yes, but he wasn’t portrayed as a black person.

Did you catch that?

Because Mufasa’s not shucking and jiving, he’s not a black person. I can’t pretend to have called my friends on this; frankly, I was stunned. The PC mindset had led my friends to charge the film with racism, and in doing so they revealed themselves to be slaves to stereotypes. Racists? Probably not. But certainly not deserving of their pious attitude toward Uncle Walt and Company.

Which brings me back to “Borat.” I happen to agree with Christopher Hitchens, who notes that the film makes Americans look more tolerant than the left seems to believe. The sequence in a “black” Atlanta neighborhood doesn’t work as humor if the viewer doesn’t have some pre-conceived notions about black street culture. The elitists were falling all over themselves to point out the rodeo audience cheering Borat’s pro-Bush, pro-War on Terror speech–guess they didn’t notice the woman rolling her eyes. I bet there were more reactions like this…on the cutting room floor, of course.

The elitists’ favorite scene, though, was the one that made fun of them intolerant southerners. The one where Borat insulted the host, crapped in a bag, and, in a move that busted up the party, invited over a prostitute. To the elites, the fact that she was OBVIOUSLY a prostitute had NOTHING to do with her presence breaking up the party. You remember, she was black. And this crowd was clearly offended to be in the presence of a black woman.

I don’t think this is the case and the reaction reveals more about the elites than the scene itself reveals about the great unwashed southern masses. In the end, the Liberal elites had to interpret the movie in this way, if only to excuse themselves for embracing a movie with wall-to-wall juvenile poop and penis jokes. With “Brüno,” they’re taking the “Lion King” approach, embracing it less than they did “Borat” and pointing out the stereotypes. I can’t wait to see what it reveals about them.