Category: 1990s

Accountant Johnny Depp travels to a company town for a new job, only to be told by owner Robert Mitchum that the job has been filled. He drowns his sorrows by spending the night with a prostitute and ends up in a shoot-out with her former lover, Mitchum’s son. It’s a surrealistic journey as he travels, accompanied by a native man named Nobody and trailed by bounty hunters, west to the Pacific Ocean to die due to the bullet that is lodged near his heart. Between scene jumps and vision quest hallucinations, I had a bit of a tough time following the narrative a bit, but that seemed to be deliberate and at some point just went with the general flow to the fatal end.  

In this fictionalized account of the 1920s gang war between the Italian/Jewish mafia and the Black gangsters, Laurence Fishburne has recently been released from prison and comes home to Harlem where mobster Tim Roth, under the command of boss Andy Garcia, is battling local crime boss Cicely Tyson. It’s the tale of one man’s lone rise up the ranks, ignoring advice and the trail of bloodied bodies left in his wake. The Harlem setting and focusing less on the Italian community makes it unique for a 1920s gangster film. It’s a bit slow in its telling, but does have a lot of star power, especially in its largely black cast, including Loretta Devine, Vanessa Williams, Chi McBride, and Queen Latifah. 

Based on the story of the 1961 sinking of the Albatross, Jeff Bridges and his wife Caroline Goodall are instructors on a school at sea sailing boat filled with a crew of white teenaged boys. Bridges runs a strict, extremely disciplined ship but that isn’t enough when the ship runs into a storm that some believe was a white squall. It has an appealing cast of 1990s heart throbs including Scott Wolf, Jeremy Sisto, and Ryan Phillippe but the story takes a bit long to get to the actual storm and the attempts at building characters whose fates the viewer is supposed to later care about fall flat.

This silly mockumentary chronicles the career of Jackie Washington, played by Jenifer Lewis, a Diana Ross-like diva, who rose to fame as a singer in an all girls group and is now launching a spectacular comeback concert. It’s a bit rough on the edges, being a made for cable TV film, but it makes up for it with the astounding number of cameos, celebrities either portraying versions of themselves or as fictional characters. Lewis thoroughly embraces the role in all her full-throttle divaness. As with The Five Heartbeats, director Robert Townsend really has an eye for portraying realistic tales of early R&B characters.  

Very soon to be released convict Jim Belushi escapes from jail in order to see the Cubs play in the World Series. On the way, he stumbles across uptight executive Charles Grodin’s filofax and for reasons unknown, takes over the latter’s life. I watched this because of the Cubs connection but there’s sadly barely any baseball shown in the film. Instead, it’s all about Belushi’s hijinks as he ruins Grodin’s life. For some reason, everyone in the film seems to treat Belushi as an attractive, lovable scamp, but there’s no actual evidence shown supporting this. It’s somehow billed as a comedy yet is almost completely unfunny.  

After Kiefer Sutherland is acquitted of the brutal rape and murder of her teenage daughter, Sally Field is determined to avenge her daughter’s death. It verges a bit into TV movie territory, but Kiefer commits to full-throttle creeper while Sally breaks out her best full-power mama bear to bring him down. The rape scenes are brutal one; the first one perhaps made worse that it happens among the decorations for a younger sister’s birthday party. Perhaps an artifact from the original novel that takes some different directions, there’s a weird parallel story about an undercover FBI agent that doesn’t go anywhere.  

Kyra Sedgwick is an assassin tasked with recovering her boss’s girlfriend, Robin Tunney, and whose job becomes much more difficult when the girlfriend murders the boss’s son. There’s quite the stellar cast (Robbie Coltrane, John Ritter, Philip Seymour Hoffman) in this twisty, bloody crime-world story that skirts the line between drama and comedy. What really shines is Sedgwick and her relationship to partner Stanley Tucci.