1990 – Vineland
I
feel more than a little intellectually guilty for only including one
novel in my year-by-year rundown, but I’d have to say that the 1990s
weren’t particularly well served in a literary sense. Fortunately,
though, the decade opens with perhaps the warmest, most welcoming book
my favorite author ever wrote.
Vineland takes place in 1984, but
is very much a love letter to the 1960s. It introduces us to Zoyd
Wheeler, a cultural isolate from that lost decade of love, sex and
freedom, who’s been reduced to throwing himself through windows to keep
up a stream of mental disability checks. It’s an innately comic setup,
but the backward, twisting path through time, loss and inevitability is
perfectly heartbreaking. Zoyd’s reliable antics, after all, began as an
act of genuine desperation when his wife left him, and it’s only been
the steady march of time that’s diluted them to meaningless repetitions
of what once meant so much. That’s the angle Pynchon takes as he
explores the effect aging has had on this world, and ours. It’s Zoyd’s
daughter who pulls the narrative along — or backward — as she uncovers,
thread by thread, who her mother was. And who her mother became. And,
if she learns enough from what she finds, how to avoid a similar fate
for herself. Pynchon’s narratives hurdle unfailingly toward doom, but
Vineland is the one that reminds you that life is always worth living…regardless of where you might actually end up.
1991 – A Link to the Past
It’s
a fact: the Super Nintendo is the single greatest video game console
of all time. Consequently, the early to mid 1990s were a veritable
goldmine for gamers. While the NES introduced us to massive numbers of
endearing and enduring characters, the SNES took everything at least one
step further, and managed to refine and build upon game mechanics
without overcomplicating them, or losing sight of what made them work.
Super Mario World,
Super Metroid and
Super Castlevania IV
(among so many others) all represented a realization of promise, a step
deeper into fantastic and complex universes that we always knew existed
just below the surface. But it’s
A Link to the Past that really stands out. Taking absolutely everything that worked about the first
Zelda game and disposing of everything that didn’t,
A Link to the Past
laid the precise groundwork for every game in the series that followed,
regardless of console. And while certain later entries, such as
Majora’s Mask or
Wind Waker, attempted to pull the series in other directions, it’s
A Link to the Past
that rightfully gets the credit for building the solid foundation and
framework that gave those later installments the room to expand. The
graphics are gorgeous, the music is great, and even if the challenge is
somewhat lacking, every new secret you find on the map feels earned and
satisfying. I love
A Link to the Past. It’s one of perhaps two
or three games in the history of the universe that does literally
nothing wrong, and it’s a perfect example of what made the SNES so
great.
1992 – Glengarry Glen Ross
For a movie with no action,
Glengarry Glen Ross is riveting. For a movie with two locations,
Glengarry Glen Ross feels enormous. And for a movie with so little at stake,
Glengarry Glen Ross
feels profound. It’s a story about selling real estate, and how
difficult a racket that can be, but it’s also a story about despair,
about self-preservation, about pride, about confidence, and about what
it means to be a man. It’s all of these things, and it’s more, and the
same answer is never given to the same question twice. When a nameless
emissary drops by the sales office to address unsatisfactory work, he
motivates the sales force by setting them at each other’s throats: the
two most successful salesmen will be rewarded to varying degrees, and
the other two will lose their jobs. What follows is a single,
seemingly-unbroken narrative that spans the rest of that night and the
next morning. To say any more than that would likely both give away too
much and artificially enhance the importance of anything that happens.
The magic — and the story — is all in the dialogue.
Glengarry Glen Ross
began as a stage play, and it shows. Its big screen adaptation does
not seek to overwhelm, astonish, or impress; it seeks to focus. It
seeks make you notice every shift of the eye, twitch of the finger, and
speck of spittle that accompanies a profane explosion, making it feel
like an even smaller and more intimate experience than the play could
have ever been. It’s a film that’s terrifying, and it’s terrifying
mainly because there’s nothing here to be afraid of. After all, these
are just people. Highly and eternally recommended.
1993 – Mega Man X
I deliberately avoided mentioning
Mega Man X when I basked in the glory of the SNES library above, simply so I could single it out here.
Mega Man is unquestionably one of my favorite game series ever, and
Mega Man X deviates from the classic formula
just enough to justify it as a spinoff. With an increased focus on item collection, upgrades and lingering effects of defeated bosses,
Mega Man X
brought additional levels of non-linearity to an already legendarily
non-linear experience. While the series may have gone off the rails
after another four or five games (it’s debatable), the original is a
stone-cold classic, with great bosses, impressive stages, and gameplay
so versatile that fans, almost 20 years later, are still discovering new
ways to play it.
Mega Man was never about deep plot or engrossing storylines; these were action games through and through.
Mega Man X
wisely didn’t try to separate itself from the originals by way of an
epic storyline…it simply enhanced the action, layered on new and
impressive complications, and married it to a stellar soundtrack.
Mega Man X is just fantastic.
1994 – Monster
So nobody likes
Monster.
I know that. I also know that that’s their loss. R.E.M.’s hardest
rocking album might be so much of a departure from their usual sound
that it’s hard to consider it a legitimate installment in their
discography…but so what? It’s fantastic. When I listen to
Monster
— which I do for weeks at a time whenever I stumble across it again — I
hear some of the best straight-up rock and roll to come out of the
decade. And it’s not entirely devoid of R.E.M.’s signature songwriting,
either…you just have to listen through some thrashing guitars to find
it. Songs like “Strange Currencies,” “Tongue,” and “Crush With
Eyeliner” are all pulled off with the band’s usual sideways insight into
the human condition, with all of the disappointment and humane
absurdity that implies. The band just happened to couch that insight in
some brilliantly distracting, raw, unpolished instrumentation, and that
brings with it a charm of its own…a little taste of R.E.M. as the
up-and-coming garage band they never were. Some fans are all too eager
to dismiss this brief experiment. For me it’s top shelf material,
beaten only by
Automatic For the People and
Lifes Rich Pageant. If you’ve written it off before, it may be worth a reappraisal.
1995 – “Knowing Me Knowing Yule With Alan Partridge”
I
love Alan Partridge. He ranks easily among my five favorite comic
creations throughout all of human history, and that’s due in large part
to the way that Steve Coogan slips — seemingly effortlessly — into
Alan’s skin and
becomes him. Though he started behind a sports
desk and then moved into the chat-show format, there was always
something more to him. He was never a “type,” and the humor was not
situational; Alan was a human being, free to be himself wherever — and
with whomever — he was. He was a person, a person with insecurities,
interests, and a uniquely slanted perspective. “Knowing Me Knowing
Yule” is a one-off special that bridges the gap between
Knowing Me Knowing You With Alan Partridge and
I’m Alan Partridge…two
very different, but perfectly complementary, insights into this
fascinating man. It’s presented as a needlessly expensive and woefully
inessential yuletide installment of Alan’s chat show, and it’s what
seals the casket on his broadcasting career forever. Considering that
the last proper episode of Alan’s chat show saw him shooting a guest
through the heart live on air, that gives you an idea of just how poorly
this festive outing manages to go. It’s a great and always welcome
entry into the Christmas special canon, and worth a watch at least once
per year. Alan getting threatened by a transvestite, failing to
properly lip-synch “The 12 Days of Christmas” and struggling desperately
to halt an in-process bit of product placement never gets old. Watch
it during a family gathering. Believe me, it will make you feel better
about everyone you’re related to.
1996 – “22 Short Films About Springfield”
Coming at a time when
The Simpsons
could genuinely do no wrong, “22 Short Films About Springfield” reads
like a time-capsule today. It’s a relic — and a loving, fascinating,
and clever one — of a time when Springfield was more than just a sea of
caricatures and types; it was a place, fully functional in and of
itself. One operating under its own logic and impossible to mistake for
the real world, but real in its own way all the same. It’s a half hour
without plot, without intention, and without a moral…just a simple, and
undoubtedly well-earned, chance to take a deep breath and survey the
incredible playground the show had built up for itself by that point.
The characters were so well established and the dynamics between them so
fruitful that all you needed to do was let Apu take some time off,
bring Reverend Lovejoy and his dog to Flanders’ front lawn, or give a
stranger the chance to turn the tables on Nelson, and comedy would flow.
Effortless, wonderful, eternal comedy. “22 Short Films About
Springfield” floats by like a whisper, as it should. While any other
show on television could work harder and harder every week to make even a
fraction of the impact on the cultural landscape that
The Simpsons made,
The Simpsons
itself didn’t seem to need to work at all. It could just step back and
see what the characters were doing…and, here, that’s what it did. The
Skinner / Chalmers segment will go down in history as an all-time best
sequence no matter how long the show runs, but even if that clear
highlight were to be somehow excised from the episode, “22 Short Films
About Springfield” would still be a perfect gem. With so many
forgettable seasons behind us now, the episode is almost like footage of
a great civilization long gone: those of us that were there will
always have this souvenir, and those who missed it will be eternally
grateful for this brief — and brilliant — window into the past.
1997 – Time Out of Mind
I’ve talked a bit about Dylan’s lost years
here, but I didn’t say much about what brought him back to life.
Time Out of Mind
is what brought him back to life. For me, it was released at the
perfect time; just as I started to explore Dylan myself, this came out.
Suddenly the warnings to avoid “the recent stuff” went quiet…and I do
mean suddenly.
Time Out of Mind is a bullet of an album…a shot
through the brain that lingers and haunts and does not let go, and
critics and fans alike flocked to it immediately.
Time Out of Mind
doesn’t feel like a comeback album…it feels like he never left. Though
his youthful, nasal prophesying is replaced here by a gravelly howl,
it’s Dylan to the core, providing one of his best love songs (“Make You
Feel My Love”), some chillingly vague danger (“Cold Irons Bound”), and a
classic meandering tale of introspection, playing Neil Young at high
volumes, and ordering hard-boiled eggs at a restaurant
(“Highlands”)…it’s a gloriously meandering shaggy-dog story that caps
off an aimless-by-design rediscovery of who Dylan is. It would be
quicker to list the things I don’t like about this album, because there
really aren’t any. Songs like “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven” and the bluntly
desolate “Not Dark Yet” triggered suspicions that this was Dylan’s
final statement…that the man had pulled it together one last time, to
end his career on a high note. He’s released four more albums of new
material since then. Dylan’s going out on a high note alright…he’s just
making sure to sustain it this time. On his next album, Dylan would
sing “You can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way.”
That would have made more sense before
Time Out of Mind, which disproves it conclusively.
1998 – Rushmore
There may not be much more I can say about
Rushmore than
what I’ve already said here, but that by no means dampens my excitement for talking about it yet again.
Rushmore is, by many accounts, Wes Anderson’s best film. Anyone who says that to you, however,
is lying. What it is, however, is Wes Anderson’s mission statement, and it’s a solid, fantastic, indelible one. Coming off of
Bottle Rocket,
Rushmore
represents an almost unprecedented stylistic and qualitative step
forward. It’s not a film in which Anderson finds his voice…it’s a film
in which we find Anderson’s voice. The soundtrack, the costumes, the
visual design, the character dynamics, the relentless attention to
detail…everything here established what it meant to be “classic
Anderson,” and it both defined a career and forever cemented a fanbase.
It also introduced the world to Jason Schwartzman, and reintroduced the
world to a penitent Bill Murray…a gift to humanity that Anderson should
always be praised for. It’s one of those movies packed so densely that
no two viewings have to feel the same, and there’s literally always
something new to notice, tucked away in the corner of a quick shot, or
hiding in plain sight while the camera dwells and your eyes wander.
Rushmore
is a great film, and while I enjoy it most for what it allowed Anderson
to do down the line, I can never watch this one without coming away
impressed all over again. And crying when Max introduces Mr. Blume to
his father. Because that part’s fucking gold.
1999 – “Space Pilot 3000”
When
Futurama debuted, it seemed like it was just going to be the less-deserving little brother of
The Simpsons.
But arriving, as it did, just at the time the elder show was losing
steam, it established itself immediately as a more than worthy
successor. While
The Simpsons took a few seasons to establish a flow and sustainable gag-rate for itself,
Futurama
burgled some writers and hijacked that momentum, allowing it to fire on
all cylinders right from the get-go. The result is an almost
impossibly strong first season, kicked off by one of the most confident
and well-handled pilots I’ve ever seen.
Space Pilot 3000 has
barely aged at all. While the voice actors may have still been getting a
handle on things, the writing is sharp and solid, and the groundwork
for countless fantastic episodes of smart science-fiction, piercing
comedy and genuine emotion is laid here. There’s a long love letter to
Futurama
that I’d like to write, but as the years go by it keeps getting
longer…eventually I’d just end up with too much to say. After all, what
can I say to a show that gave me “Jurassic Bark,” “Time Keeps On
Slipping,” “The Luck of the Fryrish,” “Godfellas,” “Lethal Inspection,”
and so many others I love beyond words?
Futurama is by no means a
perfect show, but for some silly cartoon knockoff of another silly
cartoon, it sure managed to exceed expectations quickly. It brought an
end to the 90s, but ushered in a whole new expanse of grand adventures
and brainy plotwork. Philip J Fry inadvertently froze himself, and woke
up in a far stronger television landscape. Welcome to the world of
tomorrow.
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