Happy Thirty Years to one of the most important summer blockbusters ever released, a film vastly more inspired than anything you’ll find at the cinema this weekend.
Alien vs. Aliens isn’t going away. Much like The Terminator vs. T2, the vested interests on either side are nerd-encampments that have ballooned into nerd platoons with full hierarchies and codified handshakes, but at least there aren’t any palisades blocking the channels between the first and second entries in either franchise. Most of the cases are not exclusionary, but merely preferential – “Alien is better than Aliens, but Aliens is a close-second”. We aren’t dealing with the Red Sox and the Yankees here; fans of any of these films can still lay down their arms and bond over their relatively evolved blockbuster taste. And they’re correct; all four films are, at minimum, very good science fiction showcases that toe and in some cases dance around the line between action and horror. Continue reading
This being the first of two reviews of David Bowie’s most prominent on-screen roles. 
The title being my fancy way of saying I wrote these reviews of Back to the Future II and III but didn’t upload them until now, a full six days after the proper day of 10/21/15. Oh well. You get to read them now, I suppose? 
If one looks back on the halls of early ’90s cinema, a few trends emerge, but none stands more idiosyncratically than the sudden 50-years-late splurge of Universal horror films unleashed upon the unsuspecting populace, most of which are not, in all honesty, worth discussing in any serious capacity today. Mike Nichol’s Wolf is uncommonly interesting as a reflection of its time period and a commentary on gender and power in the modern world, even if it less of a film than it is a discussion piece. Kenneth Branagh’s Frankenstein is somewhat stodgily uncomfortable and beset by Branagh’s stilted reductionist theatricality.
Jurassic Park saw classic ’80s blockbuster entertainment give way to the even sheenier, crisper branch of corporate ’90s filmmaking (very similar to ’80s blockbuster filmmaking, but much more interested in pushing the intersection of destruction and technology to its limits). For this reason, we find ourselves at a particularly strange place as we float on by 1993 and into the dark depths of the mid-90s. Cinema was only growing more indulgent, but the strain of American indies that had given light to the darkness of 80’s dramatic cinema was now entering its brightest stage of popularity and ubiquity. With corporate genre tentpoles and the distinctly dirtier world of ’90s indie filmmaking rattling around in a sort of cesspool, the two streams couldn’t but be crossed sooner or later.
For Steven Spielberg, 1993 was his real coming out. Before-hand, he was one of the most important filmmakers in American cinema, one of the few bright spots of the turgid ’80s. But after 1993, he was a god among filmmakers, and a clear genius of intent, if not necessarily execution, for striving to cover all bases in the world of populist directing. He took advantage of the year to stake out a personal trend for himself, releasing one would-be pop cultural touchstone and, perhaps prefacing any concerns that he was too focused on special effects and teenagers and not making “serious” films, a hearty, honest-to-god crippling drama to go with. In fact, he’s taken up this path time and time again (monstrous success also breeds complacency and getting stuck in a rut of one’s own release strategy and production style). Most recently, 2011 brought us the schmaltzy Oscar-bait of War Horse and the animated The Adventures of TinTin. 2005 saw the criminally underrated expressionist nightmare of a disaster movie War of the Worlds and the politically ambiguous morality tale Munich, and in 1997 came stuffy historical drama Amistad and a serious case of sequelitis in Jurassic Park 2: The Lost World. Still, expectations beget expectations, and gifts give way to curses; what he accomplished in 1993, at least in terms of pure commercial and critical success, he never equaled again. 
In 1989, a little would-be blusterous rabble-rouser who fell deeply in love with classic genre film history made a little independent film about an inconsequential twerp of a hero named Batman. And he just about conquered the world in doing so. Problems aside – namely the fact that it wasn’t much of a Batman film – it was a competent bit of Gothic blockbuster fluff and well-deserving of a sequel by the same filmmaker. And, with the sheer quantity of money the film brought in, Warner Bros. wasn’t about to go and deny the opportunity for another several hundred million dollars their way.
Edited July 2016:
If the Coens had fiction and the intellectual dents of the anarchic human brain on the mind with Miller’s
The Long Take 