Year: 1998

I’ve said it here before (I think), but it bears repeating: The biggest sin a movie can commit is to be boring. Truly awful movies, like Con Air or Lost in Space, I can at least enjoying making fun of. But when faced with duds like Speed 2: Cruise Control and Sphere, the heart just goes right out of it for me. Their inane scripts aren’t atrocious, just flat. There are no really rotten performances to ridicule. Their FX aren’t cheesy but aren’t cutting edge. The movies are kinda just… there.

Okay, so The Imposters — written, directed, and produced by Stanley Tucci — doesn’t quite reach the pinnacle the Marx Brothers achieved. The script is clever but the humor is mostly physical, of the “doors open, doors close” kind, with some crossdressing thrown in for good measure. And there certainly is much more raunch than the Marx Brothers probably ever dreamed of filling their films with. But still…

Chris Nielsen (a wonderful Robin Williams) is one of those lucky few: he found his soul mate, Annie (Annabella Sciorra). It was love at first sight for them both, but their bond goes deeper than mere love.

Devil’s Advocate has no idea how unintentionally funny it is. Keanu Reeves as a lawyer? Simply hilarious. Poor Keanu — he’s so cute but he’s just dumb as a post. His performance as hotshot Florida lawyer Kevin Lomax would be embarrassing to watch if it wasn’t so good for a few chuckles.

Think of it as the Eddie Bauer Survival Adventure: all inclusive, airfare and air crash included, all the bear meat and snow you can eat. Or consider The Edge a big episode of MacGyver as envisioned by screenwriter David Mamet.

Clay Pigeons isn’t a great film — it’s black and it’s a comedy, but never enough of either — but it is supremely interesting to watch. If nothing else, it demonstrates that the incredible talent displayed by Vaughn and Phoenix in Return to Paradise — as well the palpable chemistry between them — was not a fluke. These are two guys to watch.

A schoolbus full of children plunges into icy waters and sinks. That one event is central to two very different movies. Simon Birch builds to the bus crash, making it the culmination of a mystical plan of God. The Sweet Hereafter examines the aftermath of tragedy, how one town learns to cope with grief and the desire to assign blame.

Boogie Nights is unsentimental, unsympathetic, and decidedly unsexy. Its dehumanized characters revel in hard drugs, impersonal sex, and rampant consumerism. And yet these unpleasant characters never fail to intrigue.

None of these people seem particularly happy. So what makes them behave in these ways? What’s so missing in their lives that this makes up for it? 54 never tells us. Anita and Greg are devoted to one another and so refrain from indulging in the orgy around them, so why are they there? They certainly seem as miserable as everyone else. What do any of these people do the things they do?

Dare I even suggest we might be entering a new golden age of film? In a spring and summer of movies full of sound and fury and mostly signifying nothing, there have been a few surprisingly smart, thoughtful, grownup films, most simultaneously Hollywood-old-fashioned and forward-looking. Into that category I’d put Return to Paradise — a film that is sure to be remembered not only on its own merits but because it saw a remarkable early confluence of talent in Vince Vaughn, Anne Heche, and Joaquin Phoenix, all part of the new Hollywood vanguard.