Neil Jordan had already established his art house credibility with The Company of Wolves, and Mona Lisa, he was one of the most interesting directors working in the British Isles, and Hollywood took notice. But of course, Hollywood being Hollywood, it snatched an indie director with real potential and handed him a big commercial production. … Read more
It all started out in 1984 as a Groundlings sketch by Wendy Goldman and Judy Toll. Then it became a play. That play ran for a year instead of eight weeks. Then Ivan Reitman saw a review in the LA Times, bought the rights, and handed the project to his wife Geneviève Robert as her … Read more
1988 was a big year at the box office. Not 1989 big, but the studio slate was loaded with heavy hitters like Big, Roger Rabbit, Die Hard, Coming to America, and yes, even Crocodile Dundee II. So what chance did a poorly reviewed comedy about a talking horse set against the high-stakes world of stock … Read more
Putting Molly Ringwald and Andrew McCarthy back together after Pretty in Pink was either a calculated risk or a spectacular misreading of the room, and I still can’t tell which. By ’88, both of them were looking for a way out from under the Brat Pack umbrella, and in fairness, so was everyone else who’d … Read more
At some point, every teenager looks around at the life their parents created around them and thinks: I didn’t ask for any of this. It doesn’t matter if the walls are closing in or if they’re perfectly comfortable, the feeling of living in a world they never made creeps in. We’re living inside someone else’s … Read more
Nowadays, every car on the road has seatbelts. But automobile manufacturers in 1948 were selling chrome tailfins and the post-war suburban dream, not safety. Those cars were built like tanks, designed by people who were actually designing tanks just a couple of years prior. One of them still saw fit to make seatbelts standard issue, … Read more
For better and for worse, Robert Carradine gave screen nerds their most recognizable icon in the 1980s, and while Revenge of the Nerds (1984) handed the geeks a win, it also cemented every visual stereotype in the book, complete with taped-up glasses and a nasally snort-laugh that took another twenty years to fully shake off. … Read more
By 1988, westerns were probably more your dad’s thing. The genre had essentially vanished from screens after Heaven’s Gate cratered United Artists in 1980 and made studios terrified of anything with spurs and chaps. When westerns did appear, they were cautiously aimed at people who already loved westerns like Silverado and Eastwood going back to … Read more
By 1988, George Romero had nothing to prove. Night of the Living Dead had rewritten the rules of modern horror, Dawn of the Dead became a landmark film that turned the ubiquitous shopping mall into a mausoleum for American consumerism and Day of the Dead was his scathing and nihilistic death knell for the military … Read more
Yule Love it! These are my kind of yuletide shenanigans. Even though the original reviews were a mixed bag and the audience reception was moderate, Richard Donner’s manic yuppie spin on the ol’ Dickens Carol has become a bona fide Christmas classic – and a perennially quotable holiday staple. Scrooged never fails to put a … Read more