25 Years Ago This Month: February 1989

I always start with what I've seen...

Director Stephen Herek's second feature, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure was released in February 1989. Herek started with Critters and went on to a career of directing second tier Hollywood movies. He has never made a major film. Even when I was in fifth grade, even at the tender, inexperienced age of ten or eleven, when most people have absolutely no discerning critical taste, I knew that Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure looked stupid. I had no interest then, no interest through the following years of middle school when friends talked about it and quoted it, no interest when the sequel arrived in 1991. And I certainly have no interest now in watching Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter play a couple of illiterate and retarded teenagers who time travel through history to help themselves write a school essay.

Kicking and Screaming Movie Review

Watching all those Whit Stillman movies a couple of months ago got me thinking again about Kicking and Screaming, a movie about four friends recently graduated from college, which I hadn’t seen since I was their age. It was Noah Baumbach’s first feature film (he shares a story credit with Oliver Berkman), made on a fairly low budget in the mid-90s when low budgets were sheik, and features the actor Chris Eigeman, whose presence is part of what connects the movie in my mind to Stillman’s work. That and similar writing styles that focus on educated characters who speak literately and engagingly on a variety of topics.

Some Kind of Wonderful Movie Review: 25 Years Ago This Month

Some Kind of Wonderful is often compared to Pretty in Pink as being a retread of similar material. Both were written by John Hughes, that master of writing teen characters in the 80s, but I think the similarity between the two is superficial. It’s true that both films are about class divides in American high schools. Both are about a teen from the poor side of town who falls in love with a rich kid. But Hughes, in his way of probing beneath the surface, uncovered different layers in this telling.

"That Was Fuckin' Trippy": Pulp Fiction Analysis Part X

Go to Part IX: "Is that what you'd call an uncomfortable silence?"

As Vincent speeds along the streets, taking Mia to Lance’s house, notice Tarantino no longer uses a process shot for the moving vehicle. He maintains realism throughout the overdose sequence. After Lance hangs up the phone and just as Vincent drives up onto the lawn, Tarantino switches to a hand-held camera for most of the scene. This gives an immediacy and sense of disorder to what’s going on.

Here, the lack of a process shot adds to the realism of the scene.

"It's a Sex Thing. It Helps Fellatio": Pulp Fiction Analysis Part VI

Part V: "In the fifth your ass goes down."

Jodi with the 18 piercings.

Open on Jody (Rosanna Arquette) and Trudi discussing piercing while Vincent listens. He is then summoned inside by Lance (Eric Stoltz) to make a heroin deal. Because Lance is out of balloons he has to use a baggie to give Vincent his heroin. Usually heroin is sold in balloons while cocaine is in baggies. This will be important later.

Baggies of heroin.

Modern Classic Movie Review: Pulp Fiction

As a special treat to celebrate my 100th movie review posted to this site (I've actually written more than 100, but they haven't all been posted here) I decided to write a full length review of the film that got me interested in film in the first place.

Additionally, over the next few weeks I will post, in pieces, the full analysis I did on the film several years ago. Keep your eyes open for that starting this week.

It’s amazing to me that after roughly twenty viewings from beginning to end plus an exhaustive shot-by-shot study of it, there are still moments in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction that make me smile, chuckle or even downright surprise me: The Wolf’s smile of appreciation for the delicious coffee served up by Jimmy; Mia Wallace’s tomato joke to break the tension after an intense scene. Incredibly, watching it again for this review, I even pulled out something new that I had never picked up on before. And it wasn’t even a minor detail, but one that ties into one of the major themes of the film.