Feeling Shiny and Happy at the Dawn of the Wide-Open Nineties
Retrieving quarters from a drawer to do my laundry, I’ll sometimes notice a coin minted in 1992 or 1989 or 1990 and think to myself, “That was a good year” or “Things were still pretty good back then.” The nineties as a whole, which coincided with my adolescence, are actually one of my least favorite decades in some ways; but I retain an affection for the early nineties and late eighties, which for me constitute a micro-era unto itself, with an array of aesthetic flavors and feelings that climax the eighties while also promising something new, yet to fully materialize. Most of my childhood memories of moviegoing are clustered around these years, and there were great movies being released every week back then: Die Hard (1988), Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988), Parenthood (1989), Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989), Cyborg (1989), Dick Tracy (1990), Total Recall (1990), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), Batman Returns (1992) – the output of new and cool distraction...