Best movies of 1992

Friends of film:

Considering that I think of 1995 as the year when things began to spiral down, turning and turning in an ever-widening gyre, it’s fascinating to see how many good popular theatrical releases there were only a few years before.

Yet. . . I give only one five-star rating. Many come close, but fail by sliding a bit back into predictability, laziness, formulae. They are comfortable being what they are “supposed to be” rather than what they could be.

The two exceptions to that are Reservoir Dogs, Quentin Tarantino’s debut film, and old hand Robart Altman’s return with The Player after unofficial Hollywood banishment.

Many of these films ripped band-aids off of respected institutions and culture, hinting that perchance there are other motivations at heart. Maybe there is a deeper cancer in the military, the courts, and the legal system, for starters, as well as civility and culture in general. Perhaps there is a rot in Hollywood itself— and heaven forfend, the sacred heart of Hollywood - Western movies.

Lots of tough guys appear this year. Veteran actors like Michael Douglas, Al Pacino & Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman, and even Jack Lemmon who is not funny at all for a change and even curses like a sailor. Who knew? And there’s Fred Gwynne - our beloved childhood icon Hermann Munster now portraying an elegant southern judge.

In some ways, this was my coming-of-age film year. Hollywood was changing and so was the society it was reflecting. I resisted many of these films for various reasons at the time, because they were brash enough to be off-putting but also predictable enough to be unworthy of my college student budget. I only came to appreciate most of them later.

There’s a unifying aspect of ambiguity. . . movies used to literally be black and white, and held on to the concept metaphorically for decades. Yet now we see movies where there are no good guys, no bad guys; where the opposite of morality is somehow neither immorality nor amorality. If movie icons are neither heroes nor anti-heroes, what are they?

You can’t handle the truth!

After years of threatening to do so, Hollywood finally turned conventions on their heads in 1992. Courtroom dramas, heists, westerns, baseballs, all seen in a new light. Maybe ’92 was a finale of some kind. Not a *grand* finale, but an inkling that there was very little to be said that wasn’t said already.

But there’s still a ways to go, and as long as the likes of Tarantino and Eastwood and Reiner abide, we’ll be all right.

FXD

Arlington VA

Click on the posters for movie clips…

Falling Down

d. Joel Schumacher

****

Michael Douglas, Robert Duvall, Barbara Hershey, Tuesday Weld

In a crazy world, the sane man is considered insane. When he snaps, the world is agog; and we cheer for the underdog defying authority, mendacity, and complaceny. This was not a new concept by the 90s, but this is a particularly nuanced version where we viewers must constantly weigh the circumstances, the consequences, and the morality of each event as it unfolds. William Foster (Michael Douglas) is neither hero nor anti-hero; he’s a guy who makes choices of varying wisdom and courage.

A Few Good Men

d. Rob Reiner

****^1/2

Tom Cruise, Jack Nicholson, Demi Moore, Kevin Pollack, Kevin Bacon, Keifer Sutherland

It took me many years to handle the truth that Tom Cruise is often the perfect actor for a given role, and this movie did a great deal of convincing me of that. It doesn’t hurt that the shining star of the great supporting cast is Jack Nicholson, (onscreen for a total of eighteen minutes), that it is set & filmed rather realistically in Washington DC, and that the climax is in a military courtroom. (FranxFlix loves its courtroom dramas!) Who’s good, and who’s bad? Maybe everyone, or no one.

Glengarry Glen Ross

d. James Foley

****^1/2

Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon, Kevin Spacey, Alec Baldwin, Alan Arkin, Ed Harris

Come for the all-star cast, stay for the penetrating dialogue. A low-budget gestalt drama rejected by all the major studios, most of the cast worked for reduced salaries in order to appear in the screen version of this off-Broadway hit by playwright David Mamet. Alec Baldwin’s role, which was added to the screen version, is one of the most compelling small roles of the era.

A League of Their Own

d. Penny Marshall

****^1/2

Tom Hanks, Geena Davis, Lori Petty, Madonna, Rosie O’Donnell, Anne Ramsay

The oft-quoted line “There’s no crying in baseball!” cuts to the heart of what makes this film so good: the idea of women stepping into the shoes of the ultimate boys’ fantasy heroes during mid-20th century wartime is so absurd as to be fantastical — yet it actually happened. The cast of B-level celebrities gel together as a team, first in defiance of their coach and then in support of him. It works beautifully.

My Cousin Vinnie

d. Jonathan Lynn

*****

Joe Pesci, Marisa Tomei, Ralph Macchio, Fred Gwynne

New Yorkers Joe Pesci and Marisa Tomei find themselves in the ruralest of settings so he (Vinny) can defend his young cousin Ralph Macchio from a murder charge. Trouble is, Vinny isn’t yet technically a lawyer. Fuggedaboutit. Despite its comedic setting, many lawyers have said this is the most accurate depiction of a criminal trial; whether that’s true or not, it certainly has one of the most climactic and satisfying endings you could hope for. Pesci and Tomei are a 90s update to Nick and Nora Charles of the Thin Man series of the 30s/40s; I kinda wished they had turned this into a series as well.

The Player

d. Robert Altman

****^1/2

Tim Robbins, Greta Scacchi, Fred Ward, Whoopi Goldberg, Cynthia Stephenson, Peter Gallagher, Vincent D’Onofrio, Dean Stockwell, Sydney Pollack, Lyle Lovett, Dina Merrill

…and too many cameos to list

Robert Altman’s fellow 70s bad-boy director Michael Cimino once said “We upset the apple cart when we overthrew the studio system. The problem is: after that, where do you get the apples?” Altman knew the answer: Why, sell the apples back to the studio, of course! Altman had been essentially blackballed by the powers that be for over a decade when rumors leaked he was making a new movie, and that “everyone” was going to be in it. Rumors turned into conventional wisdom, and soon enough every star in Hollywood was clamoring to be in it. And guess what: that’s what the film is about. Oh, and it’s also a really good noir murder mystery.

Reservoir Dogs

d. Quentin Tarantino

****

Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, Chris Penn, Steve Buscemi, Harvey Keitel, Laurence Tierney

“I didn’t go to film school, I went to films,” said director/writer Tarantino, in a very young, brash, Orson Wellesian interview— but his debut movie proves it, in spades. With a top-tier B-list cast who all deliver, Tarantino’s crackling script filmed on a shoestring budget got Hollywood’s attention. The incidental dialogue stunned and amused us, the violence horrified us, and the plot flummoxed us: this was something new. His reward was to be given a big budget to film his next project: 1994’s Pulp Fiction.

Scent of a Woman

d. Martin Brest

****

Al Pacino, Chris O’Donnell, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Bradley Whitford

Aged blind veteran Al Pacino gets his only kicks of life out by being a pain in the ass to anyone who tries to help him by exposing their mendacity. He relishes taking on a fresh victim, temporary minder Chris O’Donnell. Young Philip Seymour Hoffman and Bradley Whitford play “those” prep school guys we were all primed to hate in the 80s and 90s. (I guess James Spader wasn’t available). Technically it’s not a courtroom drama, but the climax of this film has all the hallmarks FranxFlix loves. Hoo-ah!

Unforgiven

d. Clint Eastwood

****^1/2

Clint Eastwood, Morgan Freeman, Gene Hackman, Richard Harris

Every review of this movie includes the term “revisionist” which does it a disservice. I Richard Harris, Gene Hackman, and Morgan Freeman—let alone my man Clint— show the new young piss-ant prairie-punk in town how the old folks got it done. It’s the same old story, looked at from a different angle, revealing a little more than you were allowed to see before, but…the same old story. Cuss words and graphic depictions are really the only “revision” here.

Wayne’s World

d. Penelope Spheeris

****

Mike Myers, Dana Carvey, Tia Carrere, Rob Lowe, Lara Flynn Boyle

No one expected this movie version of a recurring Saturday Night Live skit to be any good, but it turned out to be one of the best stupid movies ever made. From the opening car karoake of Bohemian Rhapsody through the credits after the triple ending, every scene is peppered with memorable gags and quotable lines, with the result that the summer of ’92 had every adolescent and post-adolescent boy endlessly saying “Sh-eah” and “Schwing!” and “De-nied!” Turn off your brain and enjoy.

The Corrected Oscars