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.

Baby (1938)*

Not to be confused with Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend (I actually did confuse the two when I was a kid and was painfully disappointed: no dinosaurs at all?!), this movie does still involve a wild animal, albeit not extinct. Cary Grant and, I don't know, probably Katherine Hepburn have a tiger they have to drive around for some reason, and they wind up in a jail cell at one point with a bunch of other people—and possibly also the tiger. I feel like I have this movie filed, for some reason, in the same folder of my brain that has Mighty Joe Young (1949) in it. In other news, my brain is organized into file folders, and this is entirely neurologically sound [see Muppet Babies: "Scooter's Uncommon Cold"].

Adorable photograph (taken moments before Hepburn's tragic death).

* Important note: this movie is actually called Bringing Up Baby, and the tiger is a leopard.

Swordfish (2001)

Wolverine is a hacker and John Travolta is a master criminal who tests his hacking skills by seeing whether he can crack some kind of code while getting a blowjob with a gun to his head. Maybe Wolvie's an undercover cop? I think Travolta's getaway plan for some kind of big bank robbery involves a school bus being picked up by a helicopter with a huge magnet, and somehow that's supposed to be a brilliant, unstoppable maneuver. Halle Berry might be in this.*

Also part of the process if you apply for a job at Google.

* Ohhhh, right. Topless, reading a book.

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.