Words Seem Out Of Place

This series looks back at the 1990s and its influence on the generation of people who came of age during the decade.  This entry is the result of a friendly challenge to take a brief, seemingly inconsequential moment from my life and explore why it made an impact on me. Sometimes, when something or other triggers the memory of her, I think about that summer night a hundred years ago when a beautiful dancer invited me to join her in the back room of the strip club, to "get to know each other." I wonder what might've happened had I taken her up on that offer. I wonder how she's doing now. I'm getting ahead of myself. It all happened one June night in the pivotal year of 1995 , when my friends took me a strip club to celebrate my newfound freedom. I had just broken off a monumentally bad several-months long relationship (we were just so wrong for each other) and was currently navigating the start of a healthy, new relationship with an old friend, Naomi, o...

Exploring why the 1995 film  Showgirls is  an enduring cult classic. ( Due to the film's copious amount of salty language and nudity, these posts are probably NSFW) If there's one character in Paul Verhoeven's deliciously trashy and impressively thongtastic 1995 classic Showgirls who epitomizes how the Vegas entertainment industry chews up and spits out innocent blood, it's Penny, AKA Hope (Rena Riffel). Poor, poor Penny. After arriving at Al Torres's (Robert Davi) Cheetah's Topless Club, fresh and new and full of excitement for a career in dance, Penny is immediately and consistently degraded by one character after another, often through the use of very imaginative and colorful language. Her initial naivety is at turns hilarious and depressing. Here's a sampling, from the film's IMDb page , of the way other characters (mostly men) talk to her: Al Torres  :  If you want to last longer than a week, you give me a blow-job. First I...

Exploring why the 1995 film  Showgirls  is  an enduring cult classic. ( Due to the film's copious amount of salty language and nudity, these posts are probably NSFW) Next year will mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of one of the most memorable films of not just the 1990s, but if you ask rabid fans like myself, of all time:  Paul Verhoeven's 1995 bomb  Showgirls.  Hyperbolic much, you ask? I mean, it bombed at the box office, right? To that I say, since when has box office been an indicator of a film's greatness? Showgirls was savaged by critics and audiences upon release, but not long after morphed into one of the most beloved cult classics in film. In terms of big-budget films that went on to attain cult status, Showgirls ranks alongside Barbarella for me as two of the best of the bunch. Its legend has only grown in recent years, and there are two new documentaries on it: Goddess: The Fall and Rise of Showgirls and You Don't Nomi . To ...

This series looks back at the 1990s and its influence on the generation of people who came of age during the decade. [This post may not be safe for work, thanks to a gif below.] More than two decades since its release, the sci-fi comic book movie  Barb Wire remains one of the essential documents of the 1990s for a few reasons. As written by Chuck Pfarrer and Ilene Chaiken, the film feels like both a time capsule of the American decade in which it was made, and uncanny foreshadowing of where we've ended up in America today, in 2019. I'm serious. Hear me out before you sneer. Maybe you had to be there in order to fully appreciate the absolute lunacy of peak Pamela Anderson media hype. When that infamous sex tape of her and then-hubby Tommy Lee was stolen in 1995, it was uploaded to the still-nascent and damn-near lawless internet for all the world to see—well, okay, for people who had the patience to sit through dial-up's excruciating wait times. Then in 1996 t...

This series looks back at the 1990s and its influence on the generation of people who came of age during the decade. Back in the day, my friends and I saw a lot of instant-classics at the cinema, often during college breaks., including  Se7en (1995) , Showgirls (1995) ,   and Heat (1995). Jan de Bont's white-knuckle thrill-ride  Speed (1994) was definitely one of our favorites. We walked out of the theater that night both dazed and energized. The shear breakneck pace of the film's sustained action was exhilarating—most of it is one long action set piece that only slows down occasionally for some beautifully timed character moments, especially those between stars Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves, who share an undeniable chemistry We're always looking for someone like us in the movies, someone who makes us feel a little better about ourselves. As a tall, lanky kid in an era of muscle-bound action heroes (including several of the popular guys at school), I ...

This series looks back at the 1990s and its influence on the generation of people who came of age during the decade. My cinematic obsession began as a teenager in the 1990s, which coincided with the Golden Age of the erotic thriller—which was often also the neo-noir erotic thriller. It started in the late 1980s and peaked in the early to mid-'90s. Movies like Fatal Attraction (1987),  Sea of Love  (1989),  Body of Evidence (1993), Romeo Is Bleeding (1993), and Malice (1993), to name a few, flooded theaters with a provocative mix of oversexed men and women doing really terrible things for money. Certainly, Sharon Stone starred in two of the most popular erotic thrillers of that time, Basic Instinct  (1992) and Sliver (1993), but when I look back today, one actor seems most symbolic of this era: Linda Fiorentino. Her performances in movies like Chain of Desire (1992 and pictured above),  The Last Seductio n (1994), Bodily Harm (...