In 1991, several novels were released that would go on to impact the world. Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series made its debut, which has since been adapted into a successful TV series. The Firm by John Grisham would go on to become a highly praised Tom Cruise film. Stephen King made his obligatory annual release in Needful Things.
Interesting how things align sometimes in the film world. In the past week, three theatrical films have used the tropes of rom-coms to set up and inform their non-rom-com stories.
A family goes to live in a nuclear fallout bunker when the parents believe it to be necessary. 30 years later, the children have grown but never left their “safety”.
The OSS 117 films have been around for a very long time. Originally a sort of French response to James Bond and his 007, OSS 117 films seemed to disappear for a while and then, in 2006, Jean Dujardin stepped in the suit and made it his own. His films as the famed spy started with OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies (2006), followed by OSS 117: Lost in Rio (2009), and OSS 117: From Africa with Love (2021). The box set released by Music Box Films recently contains the first two films only, something that was a bit of a letdown. However, it is a solid release of these films.
In this satire of 1930s Hollywood, an art director moves into an apartment building where most people are in the industry or want to be. Soon, he falls for a troubled woman who’s involved with a few people with their own issues. Through this, he wants to make her a star.
By the end of the 1990’s, the big slasher movie boom had all but run out of steam, allowing the sub-genre to be ripe for spoofing. In came the Wayans family, all of whom had had previous experience with spoofs in the eighties with their classic “I’m Gonna Git You Sucka!” Keenan Ivory Wayans took the lead directing “Scary Movie” for Dimension Films, which not only goofed on many of the films released during that period, but had a good time with it, too.
While “Scary Movie” promised “no sequels,” we did get them because—it’s Hollywood, after all. We received about four sequels to be exact, and they all arrived with very diminishing returns. Sadly, the more the movies went on, the worse they became, so it’s ironic that the series gets worse in order of the films’ release.
Here’s my ranking of the series from best to worst.
The idea of turning “Barbie” in to a feature film has been something Mattel has been grappling with for a very long time, and there was no other way to bring her to the big screen without turning her in to something of a meta comedy. Barbie is revered but also reviled for being beautiful, because with a lot of reasonable vitriol, Barbie has been considered a vapid unrealistic representation of beauty. “Barbie” seeks to confront a world that not only holds women to unrealistic standards, but also presents us with a Barbie whose own unrealistic standards are finally dawning on her. This forces her in to something of an existential crisis where she’s forced to look for the origin of her existence and how she can obtain that sense of perfection.