Noticias del cine

Get outta here, 10 Things I Hate About You: 10 movies that embody the ’90s/A.V.CLUB

It might be terrible, but Space Jam is my quintessential ’90s movie. It’s a nightmarish concoction built from so many of the decade’s trends: the inescapable popularity of the NBA; Michael Jordan’s world domination; the commercialization and sanitizing of hip-hop culture; Wayne Knight; and, of course, garish Looney Tunes jackets. Perhaps more lasting and more ’90s than the film itself is the soundtrack, which was bursting with hip-hop and R&B stars of the decade, from Seal to R. Kelly to Salt-N-Pepa. Love it or hate it, you can’t deny how ubiquitous that track list became (people are still mashing up the theme song with anything you can think of) and how representative of the era’s very particular strain of schlock that movie is.

Nick Wanserski

It’s a bit rich, perhaps, to claim the definitive ’90s movie came out the very first year of the decade, but 1990’s Pump Up The Volume helped lay down the ironic, smartass soil that nourished 10 years’ worth of not caring but secretly caring so much it hurts. As Mark, a shy teen running a pirate radio station, Christian Slater modeled both the floppy hair and iron wall of sarcastic emotional defenses that would personify the ’90s. It builds off of punk disdain for hippies (represented here by Mark’s gentrified Deadhead parents), society’s bullshit (a school weeding out problem students to score higher ratings), and stuffy, outmoded mores (Mark’s DJ moniker is Happy Harry Hard-On, taken from a porn mag) but added a deep sense of social consciousness—safely protected behind a layer studied indifference, of course. Even though the soundtrack was all ’80s music, it included a lot of stuff I was listening to for the majority of the ’90s.

Nathan Rabin

The only way Pulp Fiction could have been more 1990s would have been if Quentin Tarantino had succeeded in casting Kurt Cobain in the drug dealer role Eric Stoltz ended up playing. To me, Pulp Fiction wasn’t just a standout film of the 1990s: It was the ’90s personified, a pitch-black, wildly meta meditation on destiny, violence, fate, and fast food inextricably rooted in the pop culture that preceded it yet unmistakably a product of its time. Just try to listen to Urge Overkill’s “Girl, You’ll Be A Woman Soon” on a jukebox without immediately being transported back to the giddy, halcyon days of the ’90s, when everything seemed so much less apocalyptic than our current uncertain era.

Clayton Purdom

I have watched 1995’s Hackers more times than I care to remember, moving from active enjoyment of it as a kid to active distaste for it as an adult. At this point I remember it all in a sort of plotless fever dream: mid-’90s electronic music, aggressive PlayStation branding, gnarly skateboarding, a young Matthew Lillard, lots of people banging on keyboards and shouting about the internet as an agent of utopian change. With the exception of just how ’90s it all is, it has aged remarkably poorly. Released today, Crash and Burn and the rest of the gang would probably just hang out on Reddit torrentingGundam episodes and shit-posting journalists on Twitter. The future is here!

Sean O’Neal

I might be taking the question a tad too literally by nominating Slacker, a movie that captures the ’90s for me at least quasi-autobiographically, considering I spent the back half of that decade also aimlessly drifting through Austin, Texas. I’ve written before about my own “slacker” period and the films that informed it (Reality Bites, Clerks), but all of those were just descendants of Richard Linklater’s roving, largely plotless slice of screenwriter’s-imagined-life, set among the indolent, overeducated, pseudo-intellectual working class of Generation X. Slacker captured people who were simultaneously jaded by their Reagan upbringing yet also lounging on the precipice of the Clinton era that afforded them the latitude to lie around on their Goodwill couches, smoking weed and talking about the semiotics of The Smurfs, all without having to overly worry about much. That attitude (naturally appealing to me, a guy who liked to smoke weed and lie around arguing about stuff that didn’t matter) mirrored my own, and it’s partly what drew me to move to Austin to live out my own version of the film, where I half-assed my own joe jobs alongside some of the people who’d actually been in the movie and watched while the cheap rents, coffee houses, and dive bars it lovingly immortalized slowly disappeared, falling victim to the rising influx of new residents like myself. As demonstrated by the 2011 “recreation” of Slackerfilmed at all its old locations—many of which have long since been turned into mixed-use condos—the original Slacker is a home movie of a home Austin can’t return to, and it’s a document of a place and people lost to its very specific time.

Esther Zuckerman