Almost Famous- Cameron Crowe (2000)

Halfway through Almost Famous, there’s a scene in which Kate Hudson—never more coquettish—surveys the detritus of a concert. She slides on used programs and twirls across scuffed floors as Cat Stevens whispers over the soundtrack. For a movie that’s more plot-driven than most people remember, it’s a dream-like intermission.

Even if it does divide a more hopeful first half from a more cynical second half, the scene fits in with the rest of Almost Famous because all of its world is a dream. It’s an unreliable yet loving memory of composites. Yes, Stillwater is basically the Allman Brothers, and Russell Hammond, the guitar player with mystique, is basically Jimmy Page. So what? The power of the film does not lies in its spare “dood, did he really have a threesome when he was fifteen?” parts. It comes from Crowe’s memoirist alchemy of combining the vigor of adolescence with the wisdom and nostalgia of adulthood.

For example, early on, Zooey Deschanel’s character Anna is in an argument with her mother, who is clearly informed by Crowe’s own mom. (Few works are as transparently autobiographical.) Anna screams, “This is a house of lies,” and it comes from a very real place of adolescent frustration. But that line is so loaded with the melodrama of being that age, of generalized judgments about the world around her, that we as adults are supposed to patronize it. We’ve almost been trained to. Years ago in a theater that no longer exists, I saw this idea hammered home a few scenes later, when Anna explains that the sentiment of “America” by Simon and Garfunkel is the reason she is leaving home. All of the middle-aged people around me laughed, thinking it slight that a silly song they had all forgotten could sum up a moment that significant. I slumped in my seat, embarrassed that, for a split second, I thought the idea was a bit romantic. I believed in that same artistic purity and purpose that Anna did, despite all of the social cues I was given. Besides the fact that it sounds cool, I named this blog “A House of Lies” because I want to harness that naive adolescent vitality but weigh it down with the deflated wisdom of the intervening years. Almost Famous is an attempt to stop time and drink in a moment that we’ll never get back. It’s a celebration of the moving and engaging ephemera that Crowe still loves, but it’s commenting just as much on his own life and informal education. That’s what I’m aiming for I guess.

In the third act we get another dose of that complicated treatment of the past when Ben Fong-Torres brags to William that a nearby office has a Mojo, a rudimentary fax machine that can send a page every eighteen minutes.This is one of Crowe’s more facile gags—technology that used to be state-of-the-art is now laughable!—but it underlines that the whole environment of the film is passe. This is a love letter to a setting that has clearly set, and that notion is what adds a layer of heartbreak to the proceedings. An unproven reporter gets to spend weeks with a band to craft a sought-after cover story? Such a thing as an independent concert promoter exists? In light of everything that has happened in the intervening ten years, you might as well be watching The Lord of the Rings. Emotionally, Crowe is conflicted: he’s a middle-aged child. In other ways though, the movie has taken on a purely elegiac veneer.

Perhaps I’m giving too much credit to Crowe’s thematic ambiguity. It’s clear whose side he would be on in that theater I mentioned earlier. Nearly two hours after the house of lies scene, the ever-sagacious Polexia sums up the movie with: “They don’t even know what it is to be a fan. I mean, to truly love some silly little piece of music or some band so much that it hurts.” Although he was forty-three when he directed the film, Crowe still had more in common with her and the junior-in-high-school version of me than he did with all of the soccer moms laughing. If that’s not incendiary, I don’t know what is.

Beginning a decade that cannibalized itself into superhero films and stymied bottle rockets of franchises, this is, in every way, a Personal Film. Hell, the chicken scratch super-imposed on all of the inserts is Crowe’s hand-writing. It’s literally hand-made nostalgia on Dreamworks’ $60 million tab. I could go on and on about Billy Crudup’s instinctual performance and John Toll’s sumptuous photography and the line “let’s just go get some barbecue or something” and the way Sherman at the front desk says “handful.” There are hundreds of tiny moments lovingly recreated here, and I’ve seen it so many times that I can quote them all. Not since Home Alone, when my brother and I acted the whole thing through, have I been attached to a movie and eager to enjoy it all again in such a purely child-like way.

There were a lot of movies that were deeper and more artfully made, but the reason why Almost Famous is my favorite film of the aughts is the theoretical focus that Crowe brings to it. He’s able to exalt the experience of being young, but he combines that with a realistic and astute measure that he can’t even help but feel. Most artists try to act older than they are, to bring a God-like objectivity to their work. Crowe is still a guy trying to be young. In that way, it’s all happening.

1st Quarter Movie Wrap-Up
(I’ve spent most of the first quarter catching up on 2009, and a few things I really want to catch [The Ghost Writer, Un Prophet] haven’t come out in New Orleans yet.)

1. Chloe- Is there any genre with a lower success rate than “erotic thriller”? I can name three good ones, and we’ve been making movies for about a hundred years now. Most critics have pointed to this and suggested that low-brow double-crossing steaminess is somehow beneath the talent pedigree of those involved. I think Chloe works exactly because of how seriously Atom Egoyan, Julianne Moore, Liam Neeson, and Amanda Seyfried approach this material. In lesser hands this could have been disastrous, but Egoyan’s exquisite close-ups elevate this from an average potboiler to something more tragic and provocative. You’ve never seen a Fatal Attraction-type movie look this good since Fatal Attraction. The scenes between Moore and Seyfried in particular have surprising emotional complexity, a contemplative mixture of abandonment and loss. Six years after Mean Girls, who would have predicted that Googlyeyes McBlonde would be either the biggest star of that film or holding her own with Julianne Moore? Seyfried has done both. And you get to see her boobs. It’s pretty much a win-win.*

While I’m thinking of Moore and Seyfried going toe-to-toe (and in some of the sillier scenes, lady parts-to-lady parts), there’s quite a feminist theory paper that could be written about Chloe if anyone cared enough about the film. Moore’s character, an independent obgyn, is a woman who seeks to define herself apart from her husband and empower herself with a defined, fair-or-unfair value structure. In other words classical feminism. Seyfried’s title character is that thornier brand of feminism that grew in the ’90s, in which women defined their identities through men, particularly with sexual expression. That generational dichotomy is what charges the aggresive femininity of some of their scenes.

Okay, I know I’m overselling it, but this is a good film.

2. Shutter Island- Again, this is a genre exercise made more interesting by a master craftsman, in this case Martin Scorsese. By the time all of the pieces have fallen into place, the mystery of the story seems superficial. Instead, what makes the admittedly over-long Shutter Island powerful is the breathtaking primary colored visuals. We’ve never seen a psychological thriller approached by a director with such an encyclopedic knowledge of film grammar, and Scorsese shoots it with every atmospheric trick in the book. For example, there’s a pretty perfunctory scene of DiCaprio smoking that takes on an unexpecteded eerieness when we realize that the smoke was filmed backwards, uncoiling into the cigarette. I can think of at least five individual shots in this that are better than entire movies released last year, and they add up to an imperfect but undenyingly alive and unnerving experience.

It should be mentioned that the entire cast is up to the challenge, and it definitely helps Scorsese that he can get legendary actors to show up for a scene or two. DiCaprio and Ruffalo in particular shine in difficult, thankless roles.

3. Greenberg- This is kind of an exercise in how different a script is from a final film. On paper, Noah Baumbach’s dialogue is misanthropic and unfunny, and entire characters seem like types. While the final product is still dark and episodic, it’s definitely not flat or shallow.

While Baumbach does ably surround them with welcome, washed out ’70s west coast ephemera, he has Ben Stiller and Greta Gerwig to thank for making the movie work. Stiller shows an unforeseen range and presence as Greenberg, and he plays instability without any of the usual crutches or nervous tics. He builds a subdued but real character and—the true test—we feel as if we can predict what Greenberg would do in any situation by the end. He has a devastating speech in the final reel (tragically delivered to a voicemail) that gets a lot across with an economy of language. In general, that’s one of Baumbach’s strengths as a writer. He can bury a piece of information into his dialogue when most writers would point to it and make it obvious. Indie Cindy Greta Gerwig is incapable of a false moment, and her relationship with Greenberg is frustratingly realistic.

As a whole, the film is still tiresome at points, and you feel the urge to scream at the affair’s contrarian, bourgeois pretension, but the last twenty minutes really pick up and offer some sense of redemption.

4. Hot Tub Time Machine- There are some laughs here, but the movie’s often too broad for its own good. Especially in the first twenty minutes, everyone seems so hell-bent on getting to this hot tub inciting incident that they don’t bother to develop any of the characters beyond “check it, he’s a dude who plays too many video games.” I know I’m discussing finer points of screenwriting when I’m dealing with a movie whose title kind of wears its own absurdity on its sleeve. But it’s edited pretty clumsily all the same.

There are some good gags, many of them coming from Crispin Glover’s one-armed bellhop and Clark Duke’s millenial voice of reason. (Sidebar: when is gay panic not going to be funny anymore? Haven’t we moved past this?) And there’s also this sense of missed opportunities and darkness lurking underneath that I wish had been mined deeper. However, the bottom line is that the movie isn’t quite as charming or even raunchy as it thinks it is.

* The picture at the top is from Mark Seliger’s 2008 Pin-Up series, which is pretty much perfect photography of beautiful women.

Badlands- Terrence Malick (1973)

Beginning in the mid ’60s, probably with Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, and ending in 1980, almost certainly with Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, the studio system underwent a renaissance usually referred to as the New Hollywood. Having no idea how to capture (and thus capitalize on) the spirit of youthful rebellion of the counterculture, the studios spent the ’70s trusting young, unproven filmmakers with delivering something new and provocative. As a result, they reinvented their stodgy, pandering product into a more expressive, impacting, personal art form. We haven’t reached that creative watermark since.

These unproven filmmakers were people like Spielberg, De Palma, Lucas, Scorsese, and Coppola. You might have heard of them. They were film school products who all knew one another and wanted to honor their myriad influences and use studio money to artistic statements. Spielberg and Lucas created the modern blockbuster and moved far away from this, but they started as movie brats. All of these guys made films that were personal, but the problem was that all they had done in their lives was watch movies. It’s an artistic give-and-take that we still struggle with. You may or may not know all of this, but I have to explain it to get at why Badlands is so good.

Badlands is a classic example of the ideals of this New Hollywood, but I would say that it succeeds precisely because its director Terrence Malick was not part of the Movie Brat group.

Malick came to filmmaking late after working in oil fields and studying philosophy. After graduating from Harvard, he went to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar and dropped out after a fundamental disagreement with his thesis advisor.  Clearly, this was a guy who had more to say than “I really liked The Red Shoes.” (Ooooh. Potshot at my favorite director—shots fired!) While most of those other guys viewed everything through their cinematic influences, Malick wanted to show that life is actually nothing like a movie. It is imperfect and doomed, and things don’t happen the way you want them to. Malick’s visual style is often described as “transcendental,” but to me Badlands is nothing if not grounding.

Martin Sheen and his hair star as Kit, a mercurial garbage collector who becomes enamored of a fifteen-year-old baton twirler named Holly—Sissy Spacek in a captivatingly aloof performance. The beginning of the film is scored by a whimsical xylophone, and her drawling voiceover establishes a homespun, capricious tone.

The film changes with the disapproval of Holly’s unnamed father. To punish her for stealing away with Kit without his permission, he shoots her dog. The scene strikes me because it seems obviously cruel to the average viewer, but the way it’s shot and the way Spacek delivers her description of it make it seem as if it’s completely normal. That’s just what your dad does when you disobey him. It’s a moment so specific to the world Malick has created, and it foreshadows the violence that will follow on its heels.

Kit murders Holly’s father to free her, and they run away together, killing a handful of other people in their wake. The story is based on real events, and the characters feel real. Kit ends up being, not salvation for Holly, but just another controlling, condescending presence. Holly’s youthful exuberance and innocence proves itself, upon further inspection, to be a blank void. From the beginning, these two people are damned, and even they seem to understand it. They won’t experience the happy ending they might have seen at the picture show.

You can’t discuss a Malick film without mentioning the visuals. Malick and his three DPs (I don’t know the story behind that, but I’m sure there is one. Terry has quite the demanding reputation.) use close-ups sparingly and linger upon the stark, tidy skies that seem to mock the ugly world below. This was the first taste of Malick’s lyrical template of medium two-shots and understated camera movements as well.

This sounds vague, but the dirt of this movie is palpable. I felt like taking a shower afterward or even covering my eyes when the wind started to blow. I think the dusty landscape, the way it clings to clothes or colors characters’ hair, is a visual representation of the theme: the world is messy, and everything we do has consequences. Dirt sticks.

THE QUEST FOR THE MOST ’90s FILM OF ALL TIME
Ace Ventura: Pet Detective

Over the summer, I’m going to be dipping in periodically with “analyses” of ’90s movies and assigning them points according to a very scientific method to determine which one sums up the zeitgeist and cultural milieu of the Clinton Era the best. This basically lets me watch Home Alone 2: Lost in New York instead of mow the lawn. The first entry is the aforementioned Steve Oedekerk 1993 comedy.

STARS/PERFORMANCES
- Actors Who Are Unquestionably Tied to the Decade- Jim Carrey [+10] and Courteney Cox [+10]
Each of them is pretty great upon re-watching. The only reason to see this film is to admire Carrey’s astonishing commitment to the role, as well as his rubber-limbed disregard for anything but a laugh. Upon further inspection, however, Cox proves herself an able straight-man. Her smirks at the larger-than-life Ace Ventura are what ground the film. She’s essential (and gorgeous here). Each of them is associated with the ’90s above any other decade, and they’re kind of associated with failure since then.

- Other Notable Actors/Characters- Tone Loc [+5], Dan Marino [+5]
Ace Ventura is part of a string of ’90s films that pretend Tone Loc is an average guy who could blend in as a detective or whatever, when he’s really an enormous cartoon with a voice so gravelly it sounds as if he’s in pain. He also contributes to the soundtrack [+1,000,000…]. More on that later. In what is also a pretty ’90s enterprise, Oedekerk casts Dan Marino as himself and gives this terrible non-actor a solid ten minutes of screen time to struggle.* At different points, we’re also asked to believe that Sean Young is sexy and not crazy.

TECHNOLOGY/CULTURAL RELICS
- Could the Plot Reasonably Occur with Current Technology?
Yes. [-10]

- Hacking/Computers
Ventura has a computer friend who helps him to gather information on the Udo Kier character by typing with one hand and having newspaper articles magically appear on his monitor. With a few key strokes, he is also able to “tap into all the aquatic supply stores in the area.” Despite these sophisticated keyboard commands, his monitor is black-and-white. [+5]

- Other Technological Notes
Physically sifting through files on several occasions [+1], payphones [+1], 8 millimeter film [+1], and microfiche [+3]! If you’re under the age of twenty, you probably don’t even know what microfiche is.

- References
Part of Carrey’s improvisational shtick is impersonating and recalling ’70s baby TV figures. At different points he makes allusions to Love Connection, McHale’s Navy, and Star Trek—none of which the average viewer would really get today. [+5]

This is much less common now, but since Tone Loc was a musician being employed as an actor, it was also mandatory for his services to be tapped on the soundtrack. He contributes “Ace Is in the House,” which is as shameful as it sounds, to the end credits. [+5]

There is also an Aerosmith song, “Line Up,” that scores the legitimately funny “checking rings” montage. [+1]

FASHION
Not much to speak of here. Ace is defined by boots tied over his pant-legs and the dress-shirt-opened-with-a-t-shirt-underneath look, but you get the impression he’s supposed to be unfashionable. Cox wears a bigass hat in the Shady Acres insane asylum episode. The only points I’m awarding, however, go to Marino’s tuxedo in the third act, which is all black with a purple squiggle pattern on the tie and vest. [+1]

’90s FILM CONVENTIONS
Ridiculous Conspiracy [+5]

Sexual Relationship That Comes Out of Absolutely Nowhere [+5]

Henchmen Devoid of Any Development or Personality [+3]

Exaggerated Homosexual Panic [+10]
Central to the comedy of the film is the complete disgust that anyone has for alternative lifestyles. In the “checking rings” montage, Ventura peers over a urinal partition to check out a football player’s fingers, which are of course presently engaged. The football player notices this and, instead of predictably beating Ace up, he smiles and checks out Ace’s package. Which of course gets a “yeeks” face from Jim Carrey.

When Ace finds out that Lt. Einhorn is actually a sex-changed version of suspect Ray Finkle—and that he kissed her—we are treated to a whole sequence of him throwing up/brushing his teeth/chewing gum/scratching at his mouth. When the rest of the police-force finds out about this transsexuality, they violently throw up.

OTHER
Use of Forced Perspective on the Poster [+1]

Exaggerated Head-Banging Behavior at a Metal Concert [+1]

Ace says, “Special play…quarterback sneak,” which Lt. Einhorn follows with, “Penalty: too many men on the field.” [+1]

Lt. Einhorn does the “too slow” handshake-pull-away thing to Ace [+1]

With an impressive final score of 70, Ace Ventura seems solidly ’90s, but only a survey of other movies will tell how ’90s it really is.

*- It could be argued that Marino is more of an ’80s celebrity than a ’90s one. Most of his football records are from the ’80s and so forth. I would argue that he peaked as a quarterback in the ’80s but peaked as a celebrity in the ’90s for stuff like this and his Isotoner commercials, which are featured in the film (meta bonus).

Suggestions for future titles to consider?

Groundhog Day- Harold Ramis (1993)

The ’90s brought with them high concept cinema, film premises so universal and concise that they can be summarized in one sentence. For instance, Speed is “Die Hard on a bus.” Home Alone is exactly what it sounds like. Groundhog Day, made at the same time this populist group-think began to take hold, is technically a high concept example. As the poster advertises, “Phil Connors is living the worst day of his life…over and over…” A weatherman mysteriously relives February 2. Hilarity ensues. It’s a lot less superficial than that would imply though; in fact, it might be one of the most transformative films of that entire decade.

Many of us have fantasized about what we might do in a far-fetched situation. Man, if I were the richest guy in the world, I would drive Ferraris around the world and only wear Saville Row suits. Dude, if I could relive the last ten years, I would buy a lot of Google stock. It’s only natural that those impulses are selfish. Your first thought probably wasn’t, “Bra, I would totally prevent the World Trade Center attacks.” When he realizes he’s reliving Groundhog Day over and over, Bill Murray’s Connors, already an egocentric man, tests those same impulses. He manipulates women for sex, he steals money from banks, he eats and punches and kills like there’s literally no tomorrow.

This attitude only leads to emptiness and frustration, however. These things are not as fun as they seem. It’s only through helping people, bettering himself, and being loved by others that Connors learns to move on and find meaning. I’d like to think that, along with serving God, that’s the meaning of life. Groundhog Day illustrates that we all chase the same goals and make the same mistakes, and if we’re lucky, we find out what’s important in life later. This film, even at its most fable-like, is a bit deeper than Meatballs.

That said, it’s still as funny as Meatballs too. While I’m sure the jokes work well on paper, so many of the laughs come from the frustration in Murray’s expressions. Early on in the film, before the day starts repeating itself, Connors is on the phone in a hardware store, trying to talk his way around a blizzard blockade. All the long distance lines are down. (Roffle.) None of his tactics are working with the unheard voice on the other end of the phone, and he asks, “Isn’t there some special line you keep open for emergencies or celebrities?…Well, I’m both really. I’m a celebrity in an emergency!” Then a worker accidentally hits him in the head with a shovel.

That first moment makes me laugh because it’s a perfect distillation of the character, and Murray plays up the self-importance with his exaggerated gestures. He has a naturally smug smile, which adds to his facility for playing men with a false notion of confidence. The second moment, the slapstick, irritates me every time though. It’s one of the only moments of forced comedy in a movie that unfolds in such an elegant, natural way otherwise. The shovel smack is expected in all the wrong ways. Especially considering what just preceded it, it feels as if it belongs in a different movie.

Groundhog Day is not only unique for its content though. Because its plot is fundamentally unlike anything else, its style has to do a lot of the heavy-lifting of the storytelling. For instance, watch the way this scene is edited. Even now, especially without context, you have to be locked in to follow it. And the fact that we learn of Connors’ circumstances along with him only makes us enjoy them more. It seems pretty avant-garde or indie for a movie of this pedigree. At the time, before the independent film scene had broken out, it was even more rare. That technique—and other touches, like thankfully never finding out why or how Connors gets unstuck in time—would have been called “European,” and, according to the making-of documentary, Danny Rubin’s original screenplay was even more European before Harold Ramis got his mitts on it. Ramis shouldn’t be blamed for this though, his assured hand as director contribute to the film’s swift pace and charming performances.

It’s seen as part of the comedy pantheon now—included in the United States National Film Registry, #34 on the AFI’s 100 Years, 100 Laughs list—with good reason. It was what kept me watching all of Harold Ramis’ Bedazzleds and Analyze Thats. It took us through the rough patch before Bill Murray’s late career revival. I have a copy of it on DVD, but it skips. I’ve worn it down from watching it over and over.

THE QUEST FOR THE MOST ’90s FILM OF ALL TIME
Clueless

When I first saw Amy Heckerling’s Clueless at the Belle Promenade 14, there were a lot of jokes that flew over my head. I was an eleven-year-old dude. Over time, however, I enjoyed it a lot more. It was one of those movies that HBO decided to devote a whole summer to, and the constant showings coincided with one of those too-old-for-camp-too-young-for-a-real-job summer vacations that only happen twice in a lifetime.

The movie’s still clever and heartwarming, even within a pretty constrictive form. A lot happens in a relatively short running time, which is always a plus.

Here’s what this project boils down to: It’s often noted that one of the best things about cinema is its ability to stay the same while we all change. And I was reminded of how much I’ve changed while re-watching Clueless. Are those two separate Radiohead songs on the soundtrack? Of course Paul Rudd is reading Nietzsche. And you know that associate of Cher’s dad who blows up at Cher and Josh for marking the wrong depositions and setting him back two days? He was right! Stupid kids playing footsie under the table and messing up his September 2nd files! It’s his ass on the line! Good for him for telling them to go back to the mall. That’ll sting.

In other words, I’m doing God’s work here.

STARS/PERFORMANCES
- Actors Who Are Unquestionably Tied to the Decade- Alicia Silverstone- [+10]
It’s hard to believe now—she’s thirty-four and has made only two movies that I’ve even heard of in the past ten years—but there was a time when Alicia Silverstone was one of the biggest actresses in the world based on her appearances in a series of music videos. Do you realize how implausible that seems now? She might as well have been discovered doing vaudeville. Anyway, chances are you remember her MTV Movie Award-winning performance as being stronger than it actually was, but she’s cute in it. And cute goes a long way. I wasted a lot of time downloading pictures of her with a 14.4 modem. Like I said, the more things change…

- Other Notable Actors/Characters- Dan Hedaya- [+5]
I guess it’s notable that one of Silverstone’s co-stars is forty-four-years old and one of them is dead. (Or, if you prefer, “rollin’ with the homies” in heaven.) But the most significant supporting player is actually Hedaya, one of the all-time “That Guys” with 121 choleric credits to his name. In 1995, Hedaya was in The Usual Suspects, Clueless, Casino, Nixon, and To Die For. What were you doing?*

TECHNOLOGY/CULTURAL RELICS
- Could the Plot Reasonably Occur with Current Technology?
Yes. [-10]

- Hacking/Computers
Cher has a “Clarissa Explains It All”-esque touch-screen computer program that coordinates her clothes. I assume her code-writing skills are in the deleted scenes. [+5]

- Other Technological Notes
Although cell phones are prevalent, many characters also use beepers [+3] Also, while Cher uses a film camera to shoot her pictures of Tai, she prefers Polaroids to compare articles of clothing. [+3] The characters all watch videotapes, including Buns of Steel. [+3] They use maps too. [+1]

- References
Between this and the fashion category, get ready for the scores to shoot up.

The Mighty Mighty Bosstones are playing Josh’s college party, Salt ‘N Pepa and Coolio get name-checks, and Elton bemoans the loss of his Cranberries CD. That should have been a clue that he was a date rapist, Cher. While we’re on the subject of music, Cher suggests “a trip to Tower” to the other girls. This allusion will be completely impenetrable in five years. [+10]

Characters drive Jeeps [+1], have secret handshakes [+1], and crowd-surf [+1]. But one of the most interesting artifacts is the dialogue that reveals who Cher lusts after. She’s “saving herself for Luke Perry,” wants to skip class to see “the new Christian Slater,” and reluctantly admits that Josh is “kind of a Baldwin.” You mean, he’s an overweight funny-dad-type in his ’50s with a pronounced New York accent? Thanks?* Finally, I think sparks would fly if Cher ever got to meet her dream date of Mel Gibson: Her last name is Horowitz, you guys! In all fairness to Heckerling, she picked famous actors who would still be known fifteen years down the line to keep the movie from feeling dated. She never could have imagined it would have the opposite effect. [+5]

Special mention also has to go to the slang of the movie, which was probably authentic at the time but sounds ridiculously forced now. These include: “give her snaps,” “buggin’,” “whatever,” “it’s the bomb,” “sprung,” “dope,” and “wiggin’.” [+7]

FASHION

If any movie was built to get the maximum [+15] in this category, it was Clueless. Even in 1995, people laughed at these clothes. We have exaggerated pants-sagging, backwards twill caps, baby-doll dresses, nose-rings, t-shirts under flannel, tie-dye shirts, sweaters tied around the waist, mini-skirts, and bare midriffs galore. Also, I forgot that girls used to wear boots like this? Maybe the ’90s weren’t so bad.

’90s FILM CONVENTIONS
Actors in Their Mid-Twenties Playing High School Kids [+5]

Homosexuality Being Novel [+5]
A full fifteen-minute subplot is spent on the whole “Christian reveal.”

OTHER
Um, this movie is photographed by Bill Pope, the same dude who shot The Matrix? [+1]

The extras are hilarious. Almost every one over-acts and draws attention to himself, particularly in the party scenes. [+1]

If Cher’s dad charges $500 an hour, are we really supposed to believe that he would send her to a public school? I refuse to believe that there aren’t any decent prep schools in Beverly Hills. I guess their property taxes are high enough that the public schools are good, but this is a family pre-occupied with appearances and status. I’m pretty sure he would put her in the most expensive school around just for kicks. [+3]

In conclusion, with a robust score of 75, Clueless beats out Ace Ventura to become the current champ of The Quest for the Most ’90s Movie of All Time.

*Downloading pictures on 14.4 modems?
* I love Baldwin, but he doesn’t even look like the same dude who headlined The Getaway and Heaven’s Prisoners. I might have to review one of those movies for this column because it’s impossible to take him seriously retroactively.

THE QUEST FOR THE MOST ’90s FILM OF ALL TIME
Hackers

The mid-’90s trotted out an entire film subgenre in which amoral characters use technology to thwart squares in slick but contrived productions. I’m thinking of The Saint, The Jackal, this movie. And while I ate it up at the age of twelve, I’m slowly learning that I might have just had problems with authority. Hackers is in no way a good film. It set itself up to make some interesting points about whether or not we should be rooting for these criminals in the first place, but it doesn’t deliver on anything interesting that it could have done.

STARS/PERFORMANCES
- Actors Who Are Unquestionably Tied to the Decade- None really [-5]
She’s not tied to the ’90s, but it was interesting to see how captivating Angelina Jolie was, even at such a young age. You can’t teach charisma I guess.

The reason this movie was popular on video, of course, was that you briefly get a glimpse of Jolie’s nipple, even though this is a PG-13 movie. No one seems to really push that barrier anymore: these days movies are either dirty as hell or made for children. But I remember that being a huge factor in what I watched in my more awkward years. I think Titanic in particular secretly benefited from the fact that it’s got some quality nudity for its rating. Perhaps that’s not important anymore though. I’m sure any thirteen-year-old in the country has come across more perverse shit than I could even imagine.

- Other Notable Actors/Characters- Matthew Lillard [+5], Lorraine Bracco [+5], and Wendell Pierce [+5]
This begins Lillard’s run of high-wire wacky supporting roles in flicks like Scream, Senseless, and She’s All That. He wears pigtails and disarmingly small clothing here, and you get the impression that at a certain point director Iain Softley just stopped correcting him and let him go wild.

As for Lorraine Bracco, I think she’s beyond correction. Because she has been in GoodFellas and The Sopranos, people forget how horrifyingly inept her individual performances always are. In Hackers she gets the coveted “…and Lorraine Bracco as Officer Margo” slot in the opening credits, which means that thankfully she isn’t around much. She always looks as if she’s reading off cue cards but can’t read very well. She’s like a more aloof, retarded version of Christopher Walken.

Wendell Pierce, a/k/a Bunk from The Wire, shows up as a luddite FBI agent who is responsible for lots of cliched exchanges like this:
Marc Anthony, as another agent: “The hard drive was uncorrupted.”
Bunk: “In English please.”

TECHNOLOGY/CULTURAL RELICS
- Could the Plot Reasonably Occur with Current Technology?
No. I’m not convinced that it could have occurred back then. Someone didn’t do research on how actual viruses work. [+10]

- Hacking/Computers
It seems unfair to give the movie a [+6,000], so I’m awarding it the max of [+15]. There are lots of dated lines, such as, “A 28.8 bps modem!,” and everyone uses floppy disks. But what really makes the movie ridiculous is how unspecific and unrealistic it is about how things actually work.

A real movie about hacking would be a dude typing in command prompts. I’ll grant them some poetic justice to make things exciting. But I’m not exaggerating when I attempt to describe this scene: As the Joey character hacks into the government mainframe, Softley takes us inside the computer and presents animations of green lines speeding through circuitboards and across buildings made of text. We eventually come to a big 1984ish screen guarded by a dude. Like, this is the security of a password. Okay, whatever. It’s a metaphor. But those guards are characters in the film who exist outside of this computer setpiece. And instead of the hacker being in DOS or something, these same animations are flashing on his screen. So it’s metaphorical and literal? These sequences are bafflingly misguided.

At some point, I’m sure a studio exec mandated things like this because a guy sitting at a computer does not make for interesting visuals, but you still have to have some semblance of reality. Hackers is like if the producers of The Fast and the Furious said, “We like the cars, but can they teleport instead of racing on the ground?” You’re kind of missing the point there, dudes.

Before moving on, I also loved the line—instructions over a payphone by the way: “Turn on your laptop. Set it to receive a file.” Um, just, like, from the Internet in general? There’s a switch you flip to have your computer receive a specific file from a specific person instantly? I don’t think they were in AIM.

Finally, a huge general assumption that Hackers makes is that all of the things the characters manipulate were on networks in the first place. For instance, there’s a scene in which protagonist Dade hacks into his schedule at school and puts himself into Honors English to be in the same class as Kate. (Their hacker names are Crash Override and Acid Burn.) He then sets the sprinklers in the school to go off. I guarantee that neither one of those things were regulated by computer at my school in 1995. They must go to high school at that progressive California place Steve Jobs donates all of his money to. At the very least that would explain why all of these computer aficianados are using fucking Macs.

- Other Technological Notes
Early on, the hackers record the chimes a payphone makes when you add lots of money. They get free phone calls by playing that recording into the mouthpiece. It’s supposed to seem clever and subversive, but now they just look poor. [+3]

Characters also play virtual reality video games [+3], use beepers [+1], and a tape a conversation on a reel-to-reel recorder [+1].

- References
This is our third straight movie to feature crowd-surfing [+1], which was apparently an epidemic. I should just rename this column The Quest for the Best Depiction of Crowd-Surfing. Unfortunately, Hackers doesn’t do the classic thing in which the cool character successfully crowd-surfs, then the uncool character makes a leap only to fall flat on his face because no one caught him. Wah-wah. Maybe that’s in Hackers: Redux.

Jolt Cola [+1] and Nirvana posters [+1] are prominently featured, and the underrated soundtrack is wall-to-wall techno [+5]. It even has that awesome Stereophonic MCs song. In an unfortunate development, the final shot of the film is an extended World Trade Center gag. [+10,000,000] Wah-wah.

FASHION
A strong showing in this category. Half-shirts, vests, overalls, weird parachute pants, Doc Martens, and Rollerblades. Lots and lots of Rollerblades. [+10]

’90s FILM CONVENTIONS
Actors in Their Mid-Twenties Playing High School Kids [+5]

Exaggerated, Overly Flashy Visual Style and Editing [+5]

Setup in Which Police Are Going on and on about a Hardened Criminal, Only to Have the Camera Tilt Down to Reveal a Kid [+5]

Single Mom Moves Petulant Suburban Kid to New York [+5]
This is a personal favorite. The single mom has to hustle for waitressing jobs that apparently don’t exist in the suburbs, so she moves her kid to the most expensive city in the country. At some point in the movie, that kid will invariably complain about there not being any grass anywhere.

OTHER

This movie was bankrolled by United Artists, a studio that no longer exists. [+3

One time and one time only, a character refers to his “‘puter,” as if even the screenwriter thought: “Yeah, that sounds gay. I better lay off the slang.” [+1]

The director of photography on this bad boy? None other than Andrzej Sekula, who was just coming off shooting Pulp Fiction. I know, right? If only that movie had animated computer sequences. It really would have been a classic. [+1]

With a mammoth score of 87, Hackers is the most ’90s film reviewed so far.

Winter’s Bone- Debra Granik (2010)

A classic screenwriting maxim—something as tried-and-true as “show, don’t tell”—is “All you need is a character with a goal.” Winter’s Bone, the Grand Jury Prize winner from this year’s Sundance Film Festival, exists to prove this advice in every one of its exquisitely simple frames.

Its seventeen-year-old heroine Ree Dolly is struggling to raise her brothers and sisters in the light of her father’s meth-related run-ins with the law. The trouble is that daddy, unbeknownst to her, put up their house and land for bail and then skipped that bail. If Ree can’t track her dad down, the family will lose everything. She has to navigate the perilous Ozarks and stand up to some nasty characters to try to get answers. That simple goal is what drives Dolly’s realistic choices and, ultimately, a gripping film. The screenplay builds with intensity and never minimizes the consequences of what Ree does. This is, above all, a film with consequences.

The believability of Ree’s goal rests in the capable hands and omnipresent woolen cap of young Jennifer Lawrence, who inhabits every scene of this with quiet dignity and steadfastness. In the past few years, when a young actress has been praised for a breakout performance—say, Carey Mulligan last year—it’s been because of the way she has projected vulnerability. Lawrence does the opposite. Her performance is always on the offensive, always confident, always moving forward. It’s just as impressive that Lawrence can establish the shades in between that real boldness and when the character is feigning protectiveness and confidence. Draw a face smiling, then draw a face fake-smiling. For most of us, those will look the same. Only an artist can make them look different, and Jennifer Lawrence is an artist.

Winter’s Bone fits somewhere between Courtney Hunt’s Frozen River and Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy in its portrait of America’s new poor, and it’s interesting that all of those films are written and directed by women. Perhaps that’s a different column. As in those other films, the grounded, detailed portrait of the setting adds to the stacked deck against the protagonist. The northern Missouri we get here is daunting and precarious, an uncaring, godless, desolate world laughing back at the heroine. Unlike those other examples though, Granik chose to shoot this with the precision of the Red camera, and it’s an interesting choice. It’s the most naturalistic approach I’ve seen using the Red, a camera built for hand-held use, and I think it adds to the atmosphere and featured performance. At the same time, Granik captures the grandeur of the bitter Ozarks, and, because of the camera’s high resolution, she can get across Lawrence’s marvelous work with a minimum of close-ups.

Winter’s Bone is as lean and tense as it is emotionally complex, and it goes places you would never expect. It’s the type of film that I feel the need to promote, but I have a feeling it’ll be fine. It’s strong enough that we’ll probably be hearing from it when awards season rolls around.

THE QUEST FOR THE MOST ’90s FILM OF ALL TIME
Kindergarten Cop

Encino Man won last week’s poll, so I’ll get to that one later in the week, but I had an Arnold itch that I needed to scratch. Kindergarten Cop was terrifying back in the day because I was afraid of getting kidnapped by someone with a ponytail. Now I’m just afraid of getting kidnapped.

STARS/PERFORMANCES
- Actors Who Are Unquestionably Tied to the Decade- Arnold Schwarzenegger [+5]
Arnold is as much of an ’80s celebrity as he is a ’90s celebrity, but it was in the ’90s that he did his worst work and turned into a self-aware, power-hungry caricature of himself. That development, from Commando and Predator to Last Action Hero and Batman & Robin, screams ’90s to me.

This movie was made in 1990, so he was still ridiculously swoll, which is worth mentioning. He sports a lot of polo shirts that look as if their sleeves are about to tear apart. In the early ’90s, when Arnold first started to pretend he was a normal dude, rather than, say a cyborg or barbarian, screenwriters had to take care of two things early on: 1) Why does this dude talk so funny?, and 2) Establish that Arnold is just an average joe, a guy next door. Here, there’s an early line in which he says, “Originally, I’m from Austria.”* Oh. Thank God. It’s not a tumor. And on the other front, all of the women in this movie act as if he’s some suave, eligible bachelor. Whatever you say, Murray Salem, Herschel Weingrod, and Timothy Harris.

- Other Notable Actors/Characters- Richard Portnow [+5]
A member of the That Guy hall-of-fame, Portnow has been typecast as a crooked lawyer across 146 credits, most notably as Tony Soprano’s attorney.

TECHNOLOGY/CULTURAL RELICS
- Could the Plot Reasonably Occur with Current Technology?
Yes, although I think it would be much easier to track people down. [-10]

- Hacking/Computers
None. Not a single computer in the universe of this film. That should almost get you points—pretending that computers don’t exist and that people can’t use them to, say, check whether or not a teacher working at your school has certification or the proper security clearances. Nobody would have had the Internet in 1990 though, so computers only existed for typing stuff no one else would read or playing The Oregon Trail.

- Other Technological Notes
For all intensive purposes, Kindergarten Cop is a timeless film. Aside from a few payphone sightings, this could have been made last year or in 1930.

While there aren’t any beepers or anything, let me describe how ’90s the over-long prologue to this movie is. (By the way, Kindergarten Cop drags. Ivan Reitman must have been watching a lot of Tarkovsky. I felt this two hours.)

As Detective John Kimble, Arnold, wearing a trenchcoat for no reason [+1], is tracking a suspect in a mall [+1]. This suspect is his arch-nemesis, Cullen Crisp, who looks like a retarded Kurt Russell. He has a ponytail [+1]. This Bad Guy ends up shooting another dude, but no one in the mall hears it because his gun has a silencer? [+1] There’s a witness that Crisp didn’t kill, but she splits from the police office without agreeing to a lineup. Cut to the next scene, at a sketchy L.A. club, where Kimble “persuades” her with his shotgun and one-liners to come back to the police office. He’s assaulted by two bouncers, and he has a chance to do that thing where you hold two guys’ heads and bash them together, but he just kind of pushes them instead [-1].

Here’s the thing: I think that, kind of like how Paramount will rent out their western saloon set, there was one L.A. club set all of the studios used in the early ’90s. There’s graffiti on the walls, since people apparently get their tag on at clubs. And there’s stuff going on with chain-links. Everything’s concrete, and there are couches sitting in the middle of the place. This same setup was used a million times. Just picture Shredder’s Neverland-type playground in the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. It looks like that. It’s dark and unglamorous.

Do you know what I’m talking about? In the Ninja Turtles movie, April knows that dude from the station, and his son breaks bad when he steals someone’s Walkman. He’s our eyes and ears as he gives the Walkman to a Foot Clan member and goes inside this little club Shredder has for all of the bad boys. It’s got the graffiti and chain-links, but it also has a basketball court, a half-pipe, and lots of arcade games. All kinds of stuff. How and why he paid for all of that entertainment for his soldiers I have no idea. He couldn’t have off-set all of the costs with stolen Walkmans. Anyway, you’re supposed to be hoping that our heroes in a half-shell find the place and shut it down, but I just remember thinking, “I would definitely steal a Walkman to hang out at that awesome lair.”

What was I talking about?

(Look, I know this isn’t going well. It turns out that Kindergarten Cop was not a good selection for this column. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to let the two hours I spent watching it go to waste. Just know, a writer is aware when his shit is not working.)

FASHION
All of the men wear Danny Tanner-esque blazers. In fact, on Arnold’s first day of work, he has on boots, tight jeans, a white silk shirt buttoned all the way up, and a gray blazer. [+3]

Everyone says that fashion is cyclical, but I’m not kidding when I say that any outfit one of these 1990 kindergarteners has on easily could be sold at Urban Outfitters today. These kids’ flannel shirts and sweaters make them look like extras for a Wavves video. There’s this one alt-/hip checkered cardigan that is green on one sleeve, red on the left side, blue on the right side, and yellow on the other sleeve. It’s like a Piet Mondrian painting if Piet Mondrian dug Noah Baumbach and Sleigh Bells. I would pay $80 for it on eBay. [+3]

’90s FILM CONVENTIONS
Arnold Schwarzenegger as a LOOSE CANNON WHO DOESN’T PLAY BY THE RULES BUT GETS THE JOB DONE. [+5]

Sequence in Which the Female Cop Gets Sick and Has to Keep Stopping on a Road Trip to “Barf.” Hilarious. [+3]

Exaggerated Gay Panic [+5]
Specifically, a parent “is worried” that her son “is funny” because he plays with dolls and his dad isn’t around.

A Character Gives Someone Else the Finger. [+1]

OTHER
According to the tagline, Arnold is “an undercover cop in a class by himself,” but he uses his real name while he’s under deep cover? Not exactly Donnie Brasco. Also, there are at least three times when either he or the principal leaves a public school class unattended, which is illegal.

But I guess that doesn’t matter because the school is completely aware that Det. Kimble has no experience or qualifications to teach the class. They threaten him by saying that they’ll blow his cover if he doesn’t do a good job, but in what world would they do that? I’m sure that would go over great at a town hall meeting: “This dude we had wasting a year of your child’s education with made-up ‘cop school’ and ‘pet-the-ferret’ activities? You know, the violent, loose cannon cop who is in sole custody of your five-year-old for eight hours a day? You should know that we…let him do that.” It really got me thinking: how often does a police department commit outright fraud? If I were a detective, would it just be weeks on end of pretending to do random jobs I had no business doing? That sounds sweet. I’m here to protect and serve your stock portfolio, sir. [+10]

This movie was not good and not very ’90s, as it ends up with a paltry score of 33.

*- Sometimes Arnold will mess up a line, and no one has the heart to tell him and reshoot the take. Like, he’s at a fair with Penelope Ann Miller, who is wondering where her son is, and he goes: “He’s in a pony. He’s fine.” Wait, dude. What? He’s inside the pony? Sexually? Did the pony eat him? Best case scenario he killed one and climbed inside of it for warmth. He’s not okay.

THE QUEST FOR THE MOST ’90s FILM OF ALL TIME
Encino Man 

Culturally, it’s going to be hard to avoid being an elitist snob when I have a kid, but it’s something I’ll be conscious of for his own development. Growing up, I watched a lot of bad TV and film, and it helped to shape my tastes and independently figure out what was good or bad and why. If my parents had known any better and told me not to watch cliched sitcoms and any bullshit movie that was on HBO, I might not be the holier-than-thou prick I am today. Because of my age, the star of “whatever bullshit movie was on HBO” was usually Pauly Shore.*

Here, he plays Stoney, who stumbles upon a caveman at the bottom of the hole his best friend Dave is digging to make a pool to have girls over to his house to be popular. Rather than depend on the pool-in-a-dirt-hole thing, they decide to gain popularity by convincing everyone that this caveman, who they call Link, is a foreign exchange student from Estonia (Get it?). Instead of savagely raping and killing everyone he encounters, Link will probably learn catch-phrases and do backflips at prom. What I have just described to you is an actual movie.

STARS/PERFORMANCES
- Actors Who Are Unquestionably Tied to the Decade- Pauly Shore [+10] 
Shore had a weird run of stardom in the early ’90s, fusing ’70s revivalism, self-awareness, and nepotism (his mom owns The Comedy Store in Los Angeles) to sort of become a movie star, only to fall hard. He headlined five big studio movies, and now no one under the age of twenty would recognize his name. Shore was out there—chances were his style wouldn’t last—but he swung for the fences. For better or worse, he hijacks this movie with his schtick, and he’s the only thing that’s memorable about it. I shudder to think about how drab the page was before he completely winged all of his dialogue. I could write for days about the bizarre hippie-come-surfer dialect he comes up with, but here are my three favorite lines:

3. “High school is all about greasing the doobak (?), buddy, and weezing on the buffets (?), man.”
2. [add homoeroticism to spice] “Buff spikes chillin’ on his melon obviously…he’s got the serious beak, his own personal holding company full of fundage, bro, that he weezes off of May (?) …eighteen-inch bi’s…”
1. If you’re edge ‘cuz I’m weezin’ on your grindage, just chill, ‘cuz if I had the whole Brady Bunch thing happenin’ at my crib, I’d go grind over there. So don’t tax my gig so hard-core, cruster.” 

The first time the screenwriters heard number one, they must have screamed. Or they got unwittingly frozen, experienced an earthquake in someone’s back yard millions of years later, got excavated by those people on a lark, and went to high school with them. Then screamed. 

- Other Notable Actors/Characters- [+10]
I’ll give ten points to this grab-bag of Richard Masur, future president of the Screen Actors’ Guild; Sean Astin a year before Rudy; Megan Ward, the cute chick from PCU; and a young Robin Tunney. Not to mention Brendan Fraser, who, believe it or not, is the only one of this group still working.

TECHNOLOGY/CULTURAL RELICS
- Could the Plot Reasonably Occur with Current Technology?
Um…the whole part about a Cro-Magnon man unfreezing in modern California, then going to high school without anyone being the wiser? I don’t see why not. [-10]

- Hacking/Computers
There are zero computers in the film. In fact, when the villain—he of the “buff spikes”—tries to get dirt on Link, the caveman, to figure out why he’s so weird, he actually breaks into the school’s physical office and rummages through file cabinets.

Some dudes invite Link to be in the Computer Club, but it’s done with that early ’90s condescension, with this air that knowing anything about computers will never be useful. Which is so dumb, because the earthquake/unfreezing effects would have been so much better with computers.

- Other Technological Notes
Uses of a payphone [+1], Polaroid camera [+1], and VCR [+1], as well as arcade games [+1], which don’t seem to exist anymore, almost overnight. The boys also use space heaters to UNFREEZE A CAVEMAN.

At the emotional climax of the film, Dave, without best friend Stoney’s knowledge, decides it would be best for Link to venture out on his own, because it is now inconvenient to take care of a caveman he’s afraid that people are getting close to figuring out that Link is not a foreign exchange student. He gives Link a handful of quarters tearily and explains, “…for Rad Mobile,” which is an arcade game Link likes. Even this Cro-Magnon man, with no knowledge of modern conventions or emotional nuance, gives him this look like: “Really, Samwise Gamgee? You’re giving me a skateboard and quarters? Rather than even turning me in for scientific research, which you’ve neglected to do for months, you’re going to release me to the wild like this? Is this the false note the screenplay is going for? Did me driving a car on two wheels and a rainy night staring out of the window really take you to this dangerous precipice of emotion?” Luckily Stoney appears and shows us all that we can’t turn our backs on our friends.

As far as other artifacts, there are skateboards [+1], a “cleaning up Link” montage set to “I’m Too Sexy” (half of the movie’s 90 minutes are montage sequences) [+3], PM Dawn and Tone Loc songs [+2], roller coasters [I don’t know, seems ’90s to me—+1], and an ice-rink teen hangout called Blades. (Astin intones, “Blades…finally part of the elite. How cool are we?”) [+1]

I won’t hesitate to give it a [+10] for slang, not only for anything that escapes Pauly’s mouth, but also for Robin Tunney complimenting Link as “totally rude” and using “jive” as an adjective. Lastly, there are a few times when the villain gets in people’s faces and yells, “Shush!” as if it’s a catch-phrase, like he’s making it a thing. “Shush!” is not going to happen, Michael DeLuise. It’s just not. See you in an episode of Stargate: SG1 nine years from now.

FASHION
Oh boy. It must be my birthday. I won’t include Pauly Shore’s wardrobe here, since he’s going for a more ’70s thing with bellbottoms and scarves, but I will give Encino Man props for: white sneakers with jeans [+1], Colours brand gear [+1], tucked-in t-shirts [+1], a dress shirt that is open to a t-shirt [+1], vests [+1], blazers with shoulderpads [+1], calculator watches [+1], bicycle caps [+1], flannel [+1], acid-washed jeans [+1], all denim everything [+1], and featured extra Rose McGowan in a shirt whose front tail is tied into a knot [+3].

’90s FILM CONVENTIONS
Exaggerated Sibling Rivalry- [+5]
I know that brothers and sisters sometimes don’t get along, but by high school, they don’t try to get each other into trouble. The sister character here exists solely to yell out things like, “Busted!” and “As if, mom!”

Super-Obvious Exposition- [+5]
The teacher in one of the early scenes happens to be talking to us about pre-history and how potentially dangerous a caveman would be in our world. Pretty fancy elective for a California public school, this Natural History/Anthropology interdisciplinary. I guess the bell rang before he explained how to unfreeze a caveman if one happened to become unearthed in your dirt-pool following an earthquake. (Space heaters.)

Caricatures of Hispanic Gang Members [+5]
“Yo, ese! Check out my flannel shirt with only the top button buttoned, and my sideways cap on top of a bandana, as well as my insistence that you shoot tequila to be a real vato!” Political correctness didn’t come fast enough.

High School as One Giant Popularity Contest [+5]
Don’t get me wrong, I know high school students are conscious of and influenced by popularity, but Encino Man takes it to absurd levels. Is popularity important enough for Rudy to be on some sick Daniel Plainview shit digging a swimming pool one shovel-full at a time? Is it enough to endanger the welfare of a less-evolved human being? It doesn’t help that Sean Astin is incapable of delivering a line without his Earnestness meter turned up to 400. Discussing Link to Stoney, he says: “Don’t you see? This is my one chance to make something of myself.” In a way, Encino Man is a really sad movie, and not just because they never turn Link over to scientists who can actually, you know, make giant leaps in our understanding of evolution by having a living sample of the missing link.

And, like Teen Wolf and other teen comedies, it tries to have its cake and eat it too. Dave and Stoney are unpopular because they are different from everyone else, but their reasoning for introducing a caveman into the student body is that they’ll get residual popularity because this guy is so weird that he’ll become popular? You’re teaching him how to speak and act. He’s literally wearing your clothes. If you’re not cool, why would he be cool?

I’m not above reading this as satire, that people read Link’s confusion, violence, and terse vocabulary as cool. But I think it’s just clumsy logic. If you have set up a hyper-specific standard for popularity in your universe, you can’t then immediately show us this exception to it. It would be one thing if Link became captain of the football team, but he just kind of acts like Pauly Shore, and you’ve already established that that guy doesn’t have any friends. Then again, Pauly Shore never does any back flips.

Prom Being the Single Most Important Thing That Will Ever Happen in Your Life [+3]
Secret Handshakes [+1]
Pratfalls [+1]
A Pratfall in Which a Character Lands Face-First into a Cake [+1]
Characters Screaming in Tandem, Looking at Each Other, and Continuing to Scream [+1]
Released by a Studio That No Longer Exists [+1]
Freeze Frame on the Last Shot [+1]

In the end I’m most disappointed in you, Eric Scott, Paleontology Consultant for the film. Encino Man leaves us with a respectable final score of 75, tying it with Clueless near the top of the leaderboard, but still hanging behind Hackers.

*- Except I never saw Son-in-Law. I rented it, mostly because it had Tiffani Amber Theissen in it (a goddess among boos), but my mom made me turn it off when two girls made out with each other at the beginning. “I have to draw the line somewhere,” Mom protested. Considering the crazy stuff I had seen by that age, it seemed like a weird place to draw the line. I’m telling you, homophobia: you don’t know what you’ve got ‘till it’s gone. I think Pauly Shore said that.