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.

River's Edge Movie Review: 25 Years Ago This Month

A 14-year-old girl was strangled by a 16-year old boy, possibly after he raped her. He left her nude body in a wooded area and then bragged to other students at school and even went so far as to drive them in his truck to have a look at the body. Word spread around school about the presence of a body in the hills outside town and other students went to see for themselves. For two days this went on without anyone reporting it to the police. Screenwriter Neal Jimenez took this very real news story out of Milpitas, CA, and turned it into a screenplay. The resulting film, directed by Tim Hunter, was an atmospheric and lunatic study of disaffected youth before that even became a 1990s moniker attached to a particular type of songwriting and filmmaking.

Modern Classic Movie Review: The Matrix

There are those moments when going to see a new movie in the cinema can allow you to be a witness to a sea change in filmmaking. When The Matrix was released in March 1999 I don’t recall thinking much about it beforehand in the way of anticipation. But when the movie finished, I had but one thought in my head: “Tremendous!”

The Matrix utilized state of the art technology and equipment to employ special effects in ways that augmented the story rather than supplanting it like so much of the effects-driven tripe we see now. Beyond the fantastic look of the film, it’s also a movie that strives to say something interesting. It is philosophical in nature, asking the BIG questions about destiny, technological advancement, the nature of reality and the meanings of these things for humanity. Andy and Larry Wachowski, who wrote and directed the film, are clearly movie and comic book nerds (a term I use without derision) with a solid background knowledge of the classics.