The Best and Worst Movies of 1994

Once again, I step back into the past to review the movies from the 90's, this time concentrating on the year 1994.  As with 1990, 1991, 1992, and 1993 (linked to the actual post by the year), I will talk a little bit about my favorites, a few honorable mentions, the worst of the year, and for comparison, a list of the biggest hits at the box office and the Oscars.

My Top Ten Favorites of 1994:

Bullets Over Broadway
"Don't speak!  No, no, DON'T SPEAK!"
I'm not really the biggest fan of Woody Allen.  I usually find his films too self-indulgent, mindlessly philosophical, and overbearingly pretentious, and this film has some of those elements, particularly with the characters played by Rob Reiner and Mary-Louise Parker.  However, the material really works for everybody else, and the characters and situations are hilarious.  I thoroughly enjoyed the characters played by John Cusack, Dianne Wiest, Chazz Palminteri, Jennifer Tilly, Tracy Ullman, and Jim Broadbent.  The story is very funny and inspired.

Ed Wood
This was a quirky choice that I already talked about in this blog (linked here).  Everything clicked for this well directed Tim Burton film about Ed Wood, who was the worst director of all time, but he never let that stop him from trying.  The script is first rate, and the performances, particularly Johnny Depp as the obliviously happy Ed Wood and Martin Landau portraying horror film legend Bela Lugosi during his sad last days, were all quite good.  Look for a great cameo by Vincent D'Onofrio as film impresario Orson Welles, who compares notes with Wood about their difficulties with the Hollywood system!

Forrest Gump
This film is actually better than it's often repeated catchphrases about boxes of chocolates and the many uses of shrimp.  This story of a simple man who lives an extraordinary life really captured the nation's attention and turned Tom Hanks from a star into a legend, with comparisons to Jimmy Stewart starting to take on more and more credence.  The costars Sally Field, Gary Sinise, Robin Wright Penn, Mykelti Williamson, and even the kids playing younger versions of Forrest and his girlfriend Jenny, Michael Conner Humphreys and Hannah Hall, also do some great work here.  The story takes Forrest all over the place, throughout the 50's, 60's, 70's, and on into the 80's, and in less experienced hands, it could be quite disjointed.  But here, under the accomplished direction of Robert Zemekis, it all clicked in a way I hadn't really seen since Little Big Man.

Interview with the Vampire
As a fan of the novel, I was quite curious what Neil Jordan might do with this tale of all-too-human vampires, especially when Tom Cruise was announced to play the flamboyantly evil vampire Lestat, the one pulling all the strings.  Like the author Ann Rice, I cringed at the thought, and then wound up supporting the choice after seeing the film.  More so than Cruise, however, or Antonio Bandaras' ancient vampire Armand, the best part of this story centers around Louis, the vampire being interviewed (it is his story, after all) and the tragic yet vicious little vampire girl Claudia, both well played by Brad Pitt and a young Kirsten Dundst.

The Lion King
As if the successful run of the animated The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin weren't enough, Disney continued their winning streak with this more original piece heavily based on Shakespeare's Hamlet about a lion cub named Simba who is caught in a deadly battle between his jovial and noble father Mufasa and his evil, conniving Uncle Scar.  Expertly weaving in elements of light comedy with heavy Shakespearean tragedy, sometimes both at the same time, this is probably my favorite of this late eighties/early nineties instant Disney classics.

The Mask
This was the year of Jim Carrey!  Fresh off his 5 year stint on the Wayans family variety comedy sketch show In Living Color, he had not one, not two, but three movie hits this year, with Ace Venture: Pet Detective and Dumb and Dumber, both on my "Best of the Rest" list, but my personal favorite of them all was this live action cartoon of sorts, about a timid teller in love with old Looney Tunes cartoons who comes across a magical mask that reveals a person's true inner self.  Carrey fit the over-the-top story and silly effects perfectly, and Cameron Diaz wasn't too bad either!

The Shawshank Redemption
Don't get me wrong.  I loved Forrest Gump.  It's on this list of ten favorites too, after all!  But the fact that this film didn't win the Oscar for Best Picture, or didn't wind up as one of the ten biggest box office hits of the year is a crying shame.  Despite writing mostly about demons, ghosts, and things that go bump in the night, some of Stephen King's strongest work when adapted to the big screen are his non-horror dramas.  This is one of the best, and both Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman give Oscar worthy performances.  If you haven't seen this film, do yourself a favor and see it.  It will become a favorite of yours too.

Speed
Possibly easy to forget because it's just another action picture, this one had something a little bit more.  I don't know if it was Keanu Reeves as the hero, or Sandra Bullock as the feisty heroine, or Dennis Hopper as the bad guy, or the thrilling story about a killer who rigs a city bus to blow up if it goes under 55 mph, or perhaps it was a combination of all these things, but I was hooked from the first scene where a  crowded elevator is rigged to blow to the finale on a runaway subway car!  This film was every bit as thrilling as the first Die Hard!

True Lies
Everybody is kicking around Arnold Schwarzenegger these days (and he really didn't help himself too much by starring as the world's first pregnant man in the comedy Junior, released this same year), but once upon a time, he was the man to go to if you were making an extravagant action film, which James Cameron was at the time.  The action sequences here are great, as is the constant tip of the hat to James Bond, and Jaime Lee Curtis is also great as the mousy wife who is clueless that her husband is a super-spy, letting her hair down and getting into the action with him by the end.  This was another fun thrill ride!

Wes Craven's New Nightmare
I wrote about this film before too, linked here.  I couldn't believe it!  I never thought I'd even like another slasher film, even from the inspired Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, after all those Halloween and Friday the 13th films and their ilk on an endless cycle of increasingly stupid and forgettable sequels.  The Elm Street films were pretty much destroyed and run into the ground with those last two films, parts 5 and 6, and truthfully, I was set to wash my hands of it all.  Then they released this extremely clever 7th Nightmare film that was all about the making of one more Nightmare movie, with Heather Langencamp, the victim Nancy from the first film, playing "Heather Langencamp", and the director Wes Craven showing up as himself, and Robert Englund doing double duty as both the razor-fingered dream boogyman Freddy Krueger and his real-life doppelganger.  It's all about how they begin the process of making a new Freddy film when suddenly, whatever evil force was dreamed up by Craven originally starts to come out of the film world and into ours.  That's pretty darned clever for the seventh in a tired old horror movie franchise!

The Best of the Rest:

Ace Venture: Pet Detective
The Client
Dumb and Dumber
The Flintstones
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
Maverick
The River Wild
The Santa Clause
The Stand
Wolf

If I had more room, I'd really consider adding a few family films such as the remake of Miracle on 34th Street or revisiting The Little Rascals, but this list will have to do!  At the top of the list are the two Jim Carey movies I talked about before.  Then we have another John Grisham film full of southern lawyers and clients, new big screen versions of the Flintstones, Frankenstein, and Maverick, a semi-literate, semi-werewolf movie starring Jack Nicholson and Michelle Pfeiffer (you can howl appropriately here), Tim Allen turns into Santa Claus in the first and by far the best of those movies, Meryl Streep rides the rapids with armed, murderous thugs, and over on TV was a pretty good, yet looooooong mini-series based on one of Stephen King's looooooooooooong novels.

The Worst:

Four Weddings and a Funeral
The Hudsucker Proxy
Muriel's Wedding
Natural Born Killers
Nobody's Fool
On Deadly Ground
Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead
The Shadow
Street Fighter
Swimming with Sharks

I don't know if I'm just getting smarter and watching less horror, but this year's stinkers list has only the third Phantasm film to kick around.  I'm sure there were more, but I was too smart to watch them!  That's okay though, because stinkers come in all genres, and I was nice enough not to include the audience and critic favorite Pulp Fiction, a film I just never really cared for.  Instead, I've got a lot of smaller independent films that were too dull or decadent, like Swimming with Sharks, Muriel's Wedding, The Hudsucker Proxy, Nobody's Fool, and even the big hit Four Weddings and a Funeral, which was in the top ten box office for the year.  Meanwhile, some of the action films starring Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal were starting to become a dime a dozen, Alec Baldwin should have left The Shadow on old time radio as it did NOT transfer well to the big screen, and my pic for the worst movie of the year was one that actually had nearly 50% of critics give it a favorable review, including both Siskel and Ebert:  the stomach churning Natural Born Killers.  Don't tell me all the people who gave it an 80% on Rotten Tomatoes liked it for it's message about too much violence, rather than the depraved violence itself!

For the big films at the Oscars and the box office I haven't mentioned already, which are Robert Redford's Quiz Show, Blue Sky starring Jessica Lange, and Harrison Ford in Clear and Present Danger, based on the Tom Clancy novel.  I actually found them rather pedestrian and boring, and definitely not in the same league as films like The Shawshank Redemption, The Lion King, and Speed.

Notable Oscar Films                                         Biggest Box Office Hits

Forrest Gump                                                    The Lion King

Four Weddings and a Funeral                           Forrest Gump

Pulp Fiction                                                       True Lies

Quiz Show                                                          The Mask

The Shawshank Redemption                              Speed

Blue Sky                                                             The Flintstones

Ed Wood                                                            Dumb & Dumber

Bullets Over Broadway                                      Four Weddings and a Funeral

The Lion King                                                    Interview With the Vampire

Speed                                                                  Clear and Present Danger