If you had been watching films as they were released in 1993, there must have been a fairly jarring moment when, within days of each other, The Sandlot and This Boy’s Life were released. As we discussed last week, The Sandlot idealises and romanticises growing up in the America of...
Summer holidays. Six weeks that, when you’re ten or eleven, seem to stretch out endlessly before you. The days are long, there’s no school and often not much to do, so you have to find ways to occupy yourself. For me, that often meant the cinema, or running around in...
High concept was a buzzword in 90s Hollywood, and they don’t get much higher than Indecent Proposal’s. David and Diana (Woody Harrelson and Demi Moore) are high school sweethearts who have been pretty happily married for seven years. Things seem to be going well; she’s in real estate, he’s an...
I was just the right age (8) when the cartoon series Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles started being shown on British TV (the word ‘ninja’ was removed from the UK version of the show, in one of many hilariously petty incidents of censorship that dogged the franchise on these shores). I...
We film fans often complain about the lack of originality in what the American film industry puts out. One major focus of this irritation tends to be the Americanised remake. At times it can seem like whenever we see an interesting film in a foreign language it is only a...
Sometimes Hollywood accidentally makes the same film twice in a very short space of time. Notable 90s examples include Armageddon and Deep Impact, Volcano and Dante’s Peak. CB4 came to US cinemas just a couple of months after Rusty Cundieff’s Fear of a Black Hat, another rap spoof featuring a...
John McNaughton couldn’t have made a more auspicious debut film than he did with 1986’s Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer. An unforgiving, punishingly hopeless insight into the mind and crimes of a serial murderer, the film was well received at festivals in 1986 but struggled to find a distributor,...
In 1993, Falling Down probably looked like a reaction to the LA riots, events which had in fact happened during its shooting and forced it to move and delay certain scenes. Today it’s a strange watch; of its time in casting as much as politics, but those politics can also...
Over the years, as it has accumulated two sequels and as Robert Rodriguez’ career has grown and diversified, El Mariachi’s backstory has arguably become better known and more important than the film itself. I had seen Desperado and Once Upon A Time In Mexico, but until watching it to research...