my favorite movies of 1990:

(1) Slacker

(2) GoodFellas

(3) Back to the Future Part III

(4) Life Is Sweet

(5) Misery

favorite of 1990:

Slacker

(Richard Linklater, Teresa Taylor, Kalman Spelletich, Robert Pierson, Sarah Harmon, John Slate, Louis Mackey, Kim Krizan, Jerry Delony. Directed by Linklater.)

Slacker, Richard Linklater’s breakthrough movie, challenges almost all our preconceptions about what movies are supposed to be like: where’s the plot, the main characters, the theme, the message? You might also think it has no music … until it ends with music so perfectly ebullient as to color the whole feeling of the movie in retrospect.

Slacker is a world of contradictions. It’s great by not trying to be great. It’s weird, rough, flawed, frustrating … and I only wish there were more movies like it.

My thing is, a video image is much more powerful and useful than an actual event. Like … I was walking down the street, and this guy came barreling out of a bar, fell right in front of me, and he had a knife right in his back, landed right on the ground. And well, I have no reference to it now! … I can’t press rewind. I can’t put it on pause. I can’t put it on slow-mo and see all the little details. And the blood? It was all wrong. It didn’t look like blood. The hue was off! I couldn’t adjust the hue! I was seeing it for real, but it just wasn’t right.

Stream Slacker on the Criterion Channel (with extras including commentary by Linklater) or Max. If you don’t subscribe to the Criterion Channel, try a free trial.

2nd favorite of 1990:

GoodFellas

(Ray Liotta, Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, Lorraine Bracco, Paul Sorvino. Directed by Martin Scorsese.)

The late Ray Liotta (1954 - 2022) had his signature role in GoodFellas, the true story of the gangster Henry Hill. 

Martin Scorsese said his goal in making this movie was “to begin like a gunshot and have it get faster from there, almost like a two-and-a-half-hour trailer. It’s the only way to capture the exhilaration of the lifestyle and get a sense of why people are attracted to it.”

The video below (which has spoilers) talks about how GoodFellas made a break from gangster movies of the time by showing the characters as sleazy low lifes, instead of the more dignified, elite men in The Godfather and The Godfather Part II (see my 1972 and 1974 posts about those movies).

Without GoodFellas, we might not have gotten the kinds of brutally violent dark comedies that came out later in the ’90s like Pulp Fiction (one of my favorite movies of 1994), Fargo (my favorite of 1996), or Boogie Nights (my favorite of 1997).

From a New York Times retrospective (archive link):

Scorsese was 47 when it was released, but he infused the picture with the furious energy and stylistic razzle-dazzle of a film school kid: elaborate camera movements, snazzy freeze frames, hard-boiled voice-over, non-chronological storytelling and tighter needle drops than a downtown DJ set.

The filmmaking is intoxicating because it makes Hill’s life of crime seem so seductive; it draws us into his world. So Scorsese crafts a subjective experience, often literally: in the shot introducing the various gangsters and hangers-on, all of whom speak directly into the camera … or the notorious “May 11, 1980” sequence, which uses jagged cutting, jittery camerawork and battling music cues to put us directly into the head of the film’s coked-out, paranoid protagonist. Compared with the respectful distance of earlier gangster stories (even “The Godfather” movies), the immediacy of “Goodfellas” feels like an earthquake.

The Times also points out that GoodFellas highlights the idea of “mobsters having other aspects of their lives” — “everyday marital and familial woes.” Scorsese used a suggestion by Lorraine Bracco, who plays Hill’s wife (Karen), to have the couple’s young kids show up — and for them to be played by the actress’s real-life kids. Bracco explains in the DVD commentary that she was thinking about how the couple “wouldn’t always be able to get a babysitter” — the kids would get caught up in the criminal world.

Woody Allen on GoodFellas:

Stream GoodFellas on the Roku Channel (free with ads) or these sites.

3rd favorite of 1990:

Back to the Future Part III

(Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd, Mary Steenburgen, Thomas F. Wilson, Lea Thompson, Elisabeth Shue. Directed by Robert Zemeckis.)

The last Back to the Future movie is mostly a Western set in 1885. It’s been criticized for the love story between Doc (Christopher Lloyd) and Clara (Mary Steenburgen) — which, yes, isn’t too exciting at first. But I’ll defend those slow-paced early scenes as the foundation for the best parts of the movie later on, starting when Doc struggles to convince Clara of the reality of time travel.

Is this a hold-up?

It’s a science experiment!

Stream Back to the Future Part III on YouTube (free with ads) or these sites.

For the first two movies of the Back to the Future trilogy, see my 1985 and 1989 posts.

4th favorite of 1990:

Life Is Sweet

(Alison Steadman, Timothy Spall, Jane Horrocks, Jim Broadbent. Directed by Mike Leigh.)

Life Is Sweet was the first movie to bring international attention to the British director Mike Leigh. He has an unusual process where he and the actors start developing their characters together through improvisation, before the story is written. Ebert thought this approach resulted in a different kind of movie:

Most movies begin by knowing everything about their characters. “Life is Sweet” seems to make discoveries as it goes along; it really feels as if the story is as surprising to the characters as it is to us.

Life Is Sweet revolves around a family that lives together in an ordinary middle-class house: a married couple and their fraternal twin daughters, in their early 20s. One of the twins, Nat (Claire Skinner), is polite and androgynous. She’s a plumber, which isn’t a focus of the movie but a well-chosen detail: she’s not doing the most meaningful work, but she’s a dutiful and productive member of society.

Her twin, Nicola (Jane Horrocks), is her opposite. She’s unemployed and unruly, and she seems to be going nowhere in life. She’s the most interesting character in the movie. She’s wild and individualistic … but she never leaves her parents’ house. She fancies herself a political activist … but her protests are limited to name-calling whoever’s been bothering her. (“Fascist!” “Capitalist!”) She has an eating disorder and is more interested in smoking cigarettes than having a meal with her family. When they ask her to stop smoking indoors so they can enjoy their food, she comes back with a perfectly logical solution: “Don’t eat!”

Meanwhile, their dad (Jim Broadbent) is trying to start a business out of a trailer he just bought, and their mom (Alison Steadman, who was married to Mike Leigh at the time) is working as a waitress on the opening night of a restaurant run by a bumbling, emotionally unstable friend of the family (Timothy Spall).

You can stream Life Is Sweet on the Criterion Channel, which includes the director’s commentary. At the end of his commentary, Mike Leigh reveals that it’s his least favorite movie he’s ever made! And I can understand why he’d say that: the first time I saw it, I was disappointed that most of the movie’s plotlines don’t resolve in a satisfactory way. I wanted to see more of the characters. It was like Woody Allen’s joke in Annie Hall (my favorite movie of 1977): “Boy, the food at this restaurant is really terrible … and such small portions!”

But rewatching this movie was revelatory. I sat in awe of two consecutive scenes near the end, when Nicola is confronted by her boyfriend (David Thewlis) and then by her mom. They’re some of the most honest scenes I’ve ever seen in any movie. 

Then it struck me: Life Is Sweet is … like life. It feels unfinished and ambivalent. It’s too serious and sad to be an all-out comedy, but too amusing to be simply called a drama. It can be awkward, it can be painful, but it can also be sweet. And you can find enough meaning in it to make it worthwhile.

Again, you can stream Life Is Sweet on the Criterion Channel. If you don’t subscribe, try a free trial.

5th favorite of 1990:

Misery

(James Caan, Kathy Bates, Richard Farnsworth, Lauren Bacall. Directed by Rob Reiner.)

A famous novelist from New York City (James Caan) is injured in a car accident in a remote area of Colorado. At first he’s rescued by a nurse (Kathy Bates), but she turns out to be a deranged fan who doesn’t want him to leave her house, or write a book that isn’t to her liking.

The perfectly cast Bates won the Oscar for Best Actress — the only time a movie based on a book by Stephen King has won an Oscar. In her acceptance speech, she gave a shout-out to Caan that winked at her refrain from the movie: “I really am your #1 fan, Jimmy.”  

Stream Misery on these sites.

Click here for the full list of my favorite movie(s) of each year from 1920 to 2020.