L.A. Story (1991)

I've seen this movie twice, and the second time I'm pretty sure I liked it. AND YET...all I can remember is (1) people shooting at each other in a traffic jam, (2) Steve Martin talking to a sign that quotes Hamlet, (3) the "half-caf decaf triple-latte" order, however it went, (4) marital discord with the woman from the ABC sitcom Taxi, and (5) Sarah Jessica Parker as Rollergirl.

In the early '90s, only signs spoke this kind of pidgin English.

that Archie TV movie (1990)

Did anybody see this one? It was to the Archie comics as Hook was to Peter Pan. (That was an SAT analogy for you—free of charge!) Archie and company come back to Riverdale for their 10-year high-school reunion (or 15-year, or 20-year, I don't know), and I think Archie may be married, with a kid who put Jell-O in his sheets. Or is it a stepson?—because I assume that Archie winds up with either Betty or Veronica, and I assume this isn't a story about marital infidelity. Or, who knows, maybe it is! I basically remember nothing other than the Jell-O. I think this thing was called To Riverdale and Back Again or something.

Couldn't find a decent movie still,  so this'll have to do. (via)

Lawnmower Man (1992)

I'm thinking a convicted murderer is executed in the electric chair—something like that—and winds up getting his evil soul uploaded into one of those early-'90s sci-fi misconceptions of what the Internet might be like? I think telephones and weird 3D Tron-like visualizations are involved. This is yet another movie based on something Stephen King wrote, and I think I remember that it sort of couldn't decide whether it was a Nightmare on Elm Streetish horror story or a Johnny Mnemonicky thriller. (Yes, Johnny Mnemonic postdates Lawnmower Man; I'm using "Johnny Mnemonicky" as an adjective with its own independent existence, like "Kafkaesque" or "Yahoo Serious."*)

What the Jesus? I think I sort of vaguely remember this. Does
Lawnmower Man† say he is God, or is it like Mola Ram (whom
he kind of looks like!) saying he was going to conquer God?

* E.g., "Shit's about to get Yahoo Serious up in here."
† If I'm not mistaken, "Lawnmower Man"—like "Jaws," "Die Hard," and "Wall Street"—is not in fact the name of the character.

The Cradle Will Rock (1992)*

Rebecca De Mornay is a nanny who it turns out is crazy and tries to kill Macauley Culkin. Or maybe it's just that Macaulay Culkin was in a similar movie around the same time.† I also sometimes get Rebecca De Mornay and Traci Lords confused. (Is this the movie with the literal cliffhanger at the end, or is it the one where an underage girl with a fake ID has unsimulated sex on camera for the masturbatory enjoyment of a country of perverts?)

Still from Black Throat (1985).

* IMPORTANT NOTE: I was thinking of The Hand That Rocks the Cradle.
† The Good Son (1993).

Se7en (1995)

Kevin Spacey (it turns out) is going around murdering people based on the seven deadly sins, like he makes this fat guy eat himself to death and does a horrible thing to a prostitute that I don't want to talk about. What else does he do? He puts Brad Pitt's wife's head in a box and gives it to him. (Brad Pitt—is that right?) You know when they refer to certain films as "torture porn"? I thought this movie was a kind of pornography, and I didn't like it. SORRY, SEEMINGLY EVERYBODY ELSE.

This is what comes up if you Google Image Search
"se7en" (which is stupid, by the way—the word, not
the result: a 7 does not look like a V, you jerks).

Home Alone (1990)

Macaulay Culkin gets left behind by his parents because they don't care about him, he's afraid of a pigeon man (the pigeon man might actually be from Home Alone 2: Jason Takes Manhattan), Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern try to rob his house, and he stops them with hilarious booby traps,* any one of which might easily have straight-up killed these two people. I guess I remember the entire story line (although, then again, I think all of what I just said might have been in the trailer). Christopher Columbus wrote Gremlins.

Why don't all movies star adorable hilarious children??
(Oh, right—because we're trying to keep the suicide rate down.)

* That's what I said! Booby traps!

The Opposite of Sex (1998)

Christina Ricci goes to... Wait. I'm not sure about "goes to." It might actually be the case that the only thing I remember about this movie is "Christina Ricci." I'm confident about that part. Maybe at one point the boom comes into the frame and it's somehow "meta" and intentional?—and/or an embarrassing fuck-up that my friends and I noticed and couldn't believe? [It might be funny if I pretended to think that Christina Ricci gets chained to a radiator in every movie she does, but that's not really what this blog is about. THIS SHIT IS REAL.]

Pretty much the only image that comes up if you Google this movie.
The good news is, this might end up being almost as popular as
Porky's with my accidental-Google-Image-pervert-click demographic.

My Cousin Vinny (1992)

Joe Pesci is a lawyer who represents "two yoots" in a criminal trial (car theft?), and Marisa Tomei is his hot girlfriend or sister or something who staggers around endearingly in high heels and a short dress. Is one of Joe Pesci's clients the Karate Kid? Probably it looks like they don't have a chance and then it turns out Pesci's seemingly ridiculous tactics are actually dark-horse brilliant. We might guess that the prosecutor is an asshole and is duly humiliated. Years later, Marisa Tomei is topless all over the place, and I am not trying to complain about that.

Paint on a mustache and squint your eyes, and might this not
look a little bit like The Paul F. Tompkins Show? FINALLY: A
REFERENCE I CAN BE SURE EVERYONE WILL GET.

Patriot Games (1992)

This might be the point at which Harrison Ford stopped being rakishly delightful and started getting all gruff and unhappy and "Get off my plane" about everything. In this movie he thwarts an IRA bombing and the IRA gets mad—maybe he kills somebody's brother—so they start stalking him at his beach house or something. I think maybe they drive after his wife on the highway in a Libyan terror-van ("Run for it, Marty!") and she gets in a car crash and Harrison Ford gets pissed. Or maybe that's when they go to the beach house? Like, Harrison Ford lures them there? That's all I got. [Oh, and this is kind of a Hunt for Red October sequel.]

"I am never gonna let you go! You hear me? Never!"

Johnny Mnemonic (1995)

Keanu Reeves has a microchip in his head that bad guys want, one of the bad guys has some kind of laser whip, and Henry Rollins helps Keanu out and then drives a tank or something. When The Matrix trailers started running, I was like, "What is this, Johnny Mnemonic Too?"

This movie is about the Internet. Hahahaha, Nineties.

Saving Private Ryan (1998)

I remember thinking that this movie was like a weird sandwich with unbefuckinglievably amazing war scenes as the bread and a lot of boring stuff (in the sandwich metaphor, maybe dry slices of turkey?) in the middle. And then they wrapped the whole thing in treacle.

Of course they're looking for this lost soldier, and Tom Hanks is the officer in charge. In the storming-the-beaches scene, somebody gets his leg blown off and then walks around carrying it for a second. In the other big battle scene, there's an amazingly long sequence in which a Nazi is trying to stab a Jew (and maybe actually ends up succeeding?). And Tom Hanks shoots a little gun at a tank and the tank actually blows up for some reason not actually having to do with the gun.

Oh, and the insufferable "frame story" involves a girl with big breasts being respectful in a graveyard.

What kind of inhuman monster would want to punch this man?

My Blue Valentine (1990)*

Steve Martin is a Mob informant in the Witness Protection Program. He has black hair instead of white—I think this is just his character, not part of his disguise—and he pushes a shopping cart in a supermarket (possibly also on the movie poster). Maybe he meets Rick Moranis? I don't remember anything else about this goddamned movie.

Whatever happened to Rick Moranis, anyway?

* Important note: This movie is called My Blue Heaven. Blue Valentine is a very different movie.

Flatliners (1990)

Kiefer Sutherland (I think...pretty safe guess, anyway) is part of an all-nighter-pulling team of scientists who discover that they can maybe bring people back from the dead, and a few of them—maybe all?—try it, after which I think they start having terrifying visions, like they brought something back. Then it turns out they just have to go around apologizing to people they wronged as kids. Oh, maybe one of them can't do that because the person he wronged committed suicide? Not sure what happens then. Nothing too cheerful, I'm thinking.

Also starring—Oliver Platt, as "Igor."

Sleeping with the Enemy (1991)

Julia Roberts is on the run from an ex-boyfriend or ex-husband who wants to kill her: not sure whether it's because she knows about some crime he committed or just because he's a violent, jealous maniac—I think the latter. In the end there's a suspenseful scene at an amusement park and presumably the guy dies, probably by falling off a ferris wheel or something. I remember this movie being about as cheerful and fun as you'd expect a movie about a woman-beating stalker/murderer to be.

This screenshot might be from a different movie—not totally sure.

Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994)

Hugh Grant and others (maybe Helena Bonham Carter?) are friends and have various romantic entanglements. To be fair, that's less remembering than it is guessing. I sort of want to say that the wedding-funeral math doesn't add up the way you'd expect it to, and I think one of the main characters may be gay (which at the time of the film's release was relatively unusual?). I am really straining to remember anything else about this movie. I know I saw it in the theater, and I believe I felt that it had an impact in the United States that was disproportionate to its quality. Either that or I thought it was funny—but I'll be goddamned if I'm going to go back and check.

Reminds me of that movie Homer went to see
when they pulled the crayon out of his brain
and he got too smart to like bad movies.

Mermaids (1990)

Cher is a single mother, possibly a widow, whose daughters are Winona Horowitz and Christina Ricci (in her first role!). Sometimes they have fun, like when they cook together and sing songs from the early '60s or when Cher dates Bob Hoskins, but other times things are rough, like when Winona loses her virginity and her sister nearly drowns because sex is immoral. In the end everything turns out OK, though, and they cook and sing together during the credits. [NOTE: Is there something sort of messed up, somehow, about a bunch of pretty women singing that "Never make a pretty woman your wife" song, or am I imagining that?]

Why does this look more depressing than fun? Looks like
an oasis of laughter in a desert of despair.

Point Break (1991)

Val Kilmer robs a bank in a Reagan mask, and Keanu Reeves is maybe a cop trying to catch him? And they become buddies? Or maybe they're already buddies and Keanu wants out? But they definitely surf, I know that!—and, in the end, Val Kilmer rides his surfboard off into a huge wave that I guess they for some reason know is a certain-death situation,* and Kilmer says, all meaningfully, "Vaya con Dios"—and that's the end of the movie, and my friend and I (this was in high school) looked at each other and were both like, "What the fuck?" We didn't speak Spanish.

Jesus. I feel like this movie is for guys with sunglasses I wouldn't like.

* Funnily enough, "And, in the end, Val Kilmer rides his surfboard off into a huge wave that I guess they for some reason know is a certain-death situation" are actually the original lyrics to the Beatles' "The End." (They changed it to that "love you take, love you make" business because this version didn't scan quite right and because they were like, "Paul, who's 'Val Kilmer'?" and he made this very hammy Paul face and was like, "Beats me!")

Species (1995)

My memory of this movie has been corrupted by my memory of Mimic (which I think has to do with giant subway cockroaches that turn into Mira Sorvino?). In Species a beautiful blonde woman is actually an alien—or bioengineered, or a bioengineered alien—and she keeps having sex with men and then killing them in unusual ways. I think she's being tracked by Anthony Hopkins or something, and she may be trying to reproduce. Does something come out of her mouth like in Alien? Is there any nudity?* These are important questions.

Not Anthony Hopkins.

* Google says—and I am paraphrasing, here—"Oh, yes."

Freejack (1992)

Somebody—I want to say possibly Sylvester Stallone?*—gets blasted into the future, where he's pursued by Mick Jagger (that part I'm pretty sure of) because everybody has to be registered somehow and this guy isn't because he's from the past. Either that or they're actually used to time-travelers in the future, and they want to detain our hero, but he gets away? Yeah, you know what: I think they bring him from the past so they can use his organs or something. Maybe not. At any rate, I'm pretty sure Mick Jagger ends up coming around and helping the guy out. I remember zero scenes from this movie, except Mick Jagger in his batmobile talking on speakerphone and wearing maybe a helmet like the Kodan wear in The Last Starfighter. I watched this movie in a hotel.

OK, not so much with the Kodan thing.

* Stallone, Estevez—same difference.

Phenomenon (1996)

John Travolta sees a flash of light in the sky and then starts being able to move shit with his mind. At first everybody thinks he was visited by aliens that gave him superpowers, but then it turns out he just has an enormous brain tumor, and he dies (seriously).* [NOTE: I remember that a good friend insisted, years ago, that this movie is really, really good; on what authority can I possibly say he's wrong?]

In which a man suddenly gains the power to open books.

* SPOILER ALERT: This is also how Green Lantern (2011) ends.