The Quest of 1993: The Single Finest Film of Our Generation?

This is a stone cold test of endurance. This is the crap-in-your-pants marathon of movie blogging. We are not even halfway through the necessary, yes, but mind-bogglingly painstaking process of selecting and subsequently exalting the official Single Finest Film of Our Generation and I already feel like I'm looking for my second wind. Luckily I'm not lumbering toward some nebulous point in the future that may or may not exist in which my leadership finally becomes meaningful because you, the people, the movie lovers of the blogosphere, are the reason I come back every two weeks after each much deserved respite to analyze a new year from our childhood/adolescent memories. Thus far we have pushed through the honorable finalists Home Alone, Point Break, and The Mighty Ducks and now we look to the year where I (and many of you) finally broke double digits. Ten years old we became and even deeper we did submerge ourselves into the majesty of the cinema. 1992 was a surprising hotbed of fury between an Emilio Estevez hockey movie and a Charles Grodin dog movie, so it will be interesting to see the intensity found in a voting period featuring Spielbergian dinosaurs, Jamaican bobsledders, an evil Culkin, peroxide-crazy Wesley Snipes, and a postmodern-fail Governator. Vote for your favorite (tip: think both in terms of "how much awesome is in my noggin thanks to this film?" and "how much do I wish I could be watching, laughing, and loving this movie right now?") in the comments!

Jurassic Park: The big kahuna. The whole enchilada. The top banana. When it comes to 90s cinema, hardly anything comes close to a film in which scientists bring dinosaurs (the ultimate childhood fascination as far as I'm concerned) back into existence, only to have them turn on their re-creators and run amok on an island. The best part? That could have been a terrible premise, but luckily Mr. Steven Spielberg combined the only three things he's good at (pulling heartstrings, creating there's-a-monster! tension, and communicating childlike wonder) to make JP infinitely memorable. Did The Lost World and the third one that I don't even remember ruin everything? Kinda. Is it almost unfair to include a movie that so closely straddles the line between entertainingly awesome (ah Goldblum) and genuinely awesome (my heart still almost ruptures during the kitchen scene)? Probably. But while JP might just be the only film covered throughout this quest to be both preposterous and genius, it's all about watching through a child's eyes, whether it be in the past or in the present. Even when I'm a grandpa I'll be wishing Dr. Hammond was mine.


Cool Runnings: Then again, if you wanted to be different, you could vote for what just might be the ultimate underdogs of the 90s, the Jamaican bobsled team! I have to say, even though a small corner of my heart is happy that The Mighty Ducks prevailed in 1992's vote, I personally think Cool Runnings is the most heartwarming sports movie of my childhood, and possibly, of my entire life. Man this is hard. John Candy had already won my affection in Uncle Buck and as "the polka king" in Home Alone (who was allegedly based on the "polka king of New England" that my own mother almost married in the early 90s, by the way), so when he came rolling through as the down and out Irv Blitzer, he not only creeped me out less than Gordon Bombay, but I always felt Candy had a earnestly jovial and carefree spirit that endlessly impressed me. Plus, Doug E. Doug's short-lived sitcom Where I Live was a favorite of mine that year when it premiered on (and sadly soon disappeared from) on TGIF, so I was stoked to see the two together on the screen. The one down note for CR is that I haven't seen it for years so I really have no clue if it holds up (though I'd love to give it a try). Also, a false rumor started around school after CR came out by a friend who shall remain nameless claiming that my mother stood up and cheered at the end of the film, yelling "Go Jamaica!". I don't know if that's a good or bad memory though.

Demolition Man: There's few movies I remember seeing as a kid and thinking they were totally strange, seeing as how I was a pretty forgiving critic back then as far as accepting the reality of an alternate verisimilitude, but this is definitely one of them. Even ten-year-old Chris couldn't understand why in this futuristic action film starring Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes as cryogenically frozen criminals who are thawed (one on accident, one on purpose) and released to fight each other, Taco Bell remained society's only restaurant. Or why people only had virtual mind-sex, or why there was a shell in the bathroom instead of toilet paper that was never explained how it was used!!! Okay okay, as an adult, I understand these are all semi-failed tongue-in-cheek isn't-the-future-wacky jokes, but as a kid thinking he was seeing a wicked fight scene-fueled sci-fi shoot-em-up, I ended up severely confused throughout the majority of it all. Luckily, that just made it that much more entertaining and memorable for me, and revisiting it as an adult is quite the hoot, and one of a handful of flicks on this quest that I've actually sought out and done that for, proving its unpredicted stamina as a solid gem of WTF from the 90s.


Last Action Hero: Let me tell you the one and only thing I remember from my first viewing of Last Action Hero. It's not a scene from the movie that is almost nothing but a collection of random scenes as Austin O'Brien of My Girl 2 fame literally enters a world of explosions and guns as he becomes a part of a fictional action hero's life. It's not even an image or something in my peripheral from the theater excursion with my mother, who is by all accounts, no fan of action films. It was a feeling related to that last notion, though. I had, until that point, only watched action flicks with my brother. Maybe it was because it was PG-13 or maybe it was because the marketing for the film made it seem like more of a kids' fantasy than a straight-up kaboom-fest, but as I ended up seeing the film-within-a-film, a very specific feeling jolted up inside me that I'll never forget. I felt like I was escaping and was realizing that action of escaping as I was doing it. A stupid Schwarzenegger movie that tried so hard to be clever and often confused me as a child and proves almost to be unwatchable as an adult (so I guess you can see I'm not voting for this one) is indeed still responsible for a pretty eye-opening moment in my film-dweebification process. To be fair, I should give credit to the 1992 film Stay Tuned, which came before it, for setting up the bump-set-psychological spike.

The Good Son: First came the cookie cutter family comedy, then came the action film, and finally we have the horror movie. My brother had tried to get my teeth cut in the genre earlier, but I proved to be far too much of a wuss, closing my eyes and asking him to turn off a number of video rentals, including Dr. Giggles and The Lawnmower Man. But of course, somewhere between Pet Sematary 2 and Candyman, I finally experienced my own curiosity in the obscene, the gory, and the downright despicable with the help of two child actors crossing over from that very first genre that pulled me into a love of film in the first place. It was almost too perfect an idea to not garner fascination of all ten-year-old boys who were starting to finally get cocky and think a movie had to show gruesome deaths in it in order to be good, but this time the violence was committed by children. And not little dolls with red hair or who lived in a corn field, but by actors they recognized formally as the sweet harmless stars of My Girl and Radio Flyer. Yes, with the truly evil"Mac" Culkin as a disturbed orphan and Elijah Wood as the doe-eyed innocent facing off against each other was endlessly thrilling and jarring as a newly minted 6th grader. Finally the genre made sense to me, and from there on out I set out to discover more of the weirdly dark to experience that blithe rush of terror over and over again.

This entry was posted by chris, on Tuesday, August 25, 2009. You can leave your response.