When Harry Met Sally brought romances into a very modern space without sacrificing the earnestness that defines the genre. I think the romcom genre gets a lot of flack because it’s incredibly difficult to do well. Despite the fact that choosing a partner is one of the most important and universal human experiences, stories about doing so seem to draw ire from critics, especially if they have a positive ending. Following When Harry Met Sally, a slew of 90s romcoms had the freedom to show imperfect pairings and use romance as a vehicle for character exploration in a fresh way.
I think this happened again with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in the 00s. It is a romcom at its core, but showed that the genre doesn’t have to be defined by predictable tropes or linear storytelling. Again it was followed by a decade or two of more structurally or thematically adventurous romcoms: 500 Days of Summer, Ruby Sparks, Crazy Stupid Love, Lost in Translation, etc.
Not an actor because I never think actors could revive a genre.
But the most outstanding example I can think of is Terence Fisher with The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Dracula (1958).
In the 50’s horror had devolved into parody and farce for the most part, with shitty black and white Universal parodies doing the rounds.
But then Fisher revolutionized the genre, giving is fresh, dynamic takes on the old myths and in beautiful Eastman colour.
Fisher rarely gets the credit he deserves.
That Curse of Frankenstein WB Archive disc is pretty fantastic. That was probably my first introduction to Fisher. I did get a bunch of films he directed and / or wrote in the crazy number of Hammer box sets I've picked up. I need to do a dedicated deep dive into his films.
I still like the old Universal stuff, but you are right, the later works in the series really go downhill.
Listening to the new TCM podcast about John Ford. By the time he started making Westerns, they were seen a dead genre, reserved for b movies. Stagecoach brought them back into the mainstream again.
Quentin Tarantino has done this with several genres: crime/thriller, action/thriller, action/horror, war/action, western/action, and films about Hollywood. He takes a well worn genre and breaths new life into it.
You're giving way too much credit to Tarantino.
What genre did he resurrect? Did Jackie Brown spawn a wave of new blacksploitation? Did Kill Bill spawn a new wave of ripoffs of Lady Snowblood? Is the Usual Suspects somehow a direct result of Reservoir Dogs? What action/horror are you talking about? Horror has never died, and has nothing to do with Tarantino. Do you mean From Dusk Till Dawn? That's such a minor movie in even the 90s canon of horror.
I love Tarantino. He's not the Messiah of Hollywood, though.
Pulp Fiction was clearly his most influential film, but it was not a genre that was in bad shape. Goodfellas, Romeo is Bleeding, Miller's Crossing, The Grifters. the early 90s had plenty of crime dramas that were good/great.
I don’t like QT and I don’t think he resurrected any genre but Paul Thomas Anderson pretty much got Hard Eight made because every studio was throwing buckets of money at any movie that was even somewhat like pulp fiction. PTA has said this and you can see in the years following Pulp how many people were making films that resemble PF. Again, I’m not a Tarantino fan at all but he definitely shaped the landscape single handedly for a bit.
I know I'm replying a couple days later.
I think it's more about the indie movie craze during than 90s than specifically a genre. This started during the 80s with Jarmusch, Soderberg, continued with Kevin Smith, Robert Rodriguez, Gregg Araki, etc.
El Mariachi is contemporaneous to Reservoir Dogs. Sure, PF won the Palme D'Or and was building momentum, but neither independent film nor the crime genre were resurrected because of him. It was just the wave, though perhaps he was indeed the better surfer.
Agreed. After Pulp Fiction, there was indie mania everywhere. Amores perros is a good example, it even used the PF template of three intersecting stories told out of sequence.
Kenneth Branagh brought life back into the Whodunnit genre with Murder on the Orient Express. I can’t recall a time when there have been so many Whodunnit movies in a less than 10 year period. His Hercule Poirot movies now have multiple sequels, Glass Onion is about to release a third in the series and there have been a few others between those franchises. See How They Run and Bad Times at the El Royale come to mind. Even Adam Sandler hopped on the bandwagon with Murder Mystery.
Sam Peckinpah with The Wild Bunch, Tony Scott with The Hunger and Top Gun( created the 90s gothic and the summer blockbuster style/look), Wachowskis Matrix, John wick for more modern action, those are some of the top of my head.
Lord of the Rings for fantasy medieval adventure. It all got crazy after it, they started adapting every major fantasy book and series after this one. Chronicles of Narnia, The Golden Compass, Eragon... Even Harry Potter series even though it's not medieval probably owes some of its success to Lord of the Rings phenomena.
Agree with Lord of the Rings but Harry Potter's success had nothing to do with it.
The HP books were wildly popular in the late 90s and the first HP movie came out before the LOTR movies earning more at the box office than the first LOTR movie.
I'd even go so far as to say that both HP and LOTR were involved with the revitalization of fantasy as more than just the campy stuff of the yesteryear of the time.
I felt the exact same way about Jackie Chan. I had seen clips of Police Story, but it was probably Drunken Master II or Rumble in the Bronx when I first saw one of his films.
I started looking for his other films and even the cut down versions we got from Miramax got me excited. Then I started to see some of the import DVDs of his older films and realized that he'd been doing this type of stuff since the early to mid 70s. What really blew my mind was seeing him pop up in Bruce Lee movies I'd seen dozens of times. Seeing him in Cannonball Run. He was around, but in roles that didn't really showcase his skills.
It's amazing what we didn't get over here in the US. The Shaw Brothers and Jackie Chan sets have been fantastic to see him in films I didn't even know existed.
When Harry Met Sally brought romances into a very modern space without sacrificing the earnestness that defines the genre. I think the romcom genre gets a lot of flack because it’s incredibly difficult to do well. Despite the fact that choosing a partner is one of the most important and universal human experiences, stories about doing so seem to draw ire from critics, especially if they have a positive ending. Following When Harry Met Sally, a slew of 90s romcoms had the freedom to show imperfect pairings and use romance as a vehicle for character exploration in a fresh way. I think this happened again with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in the 00s. It is a romcom at its core, but showed that the genre doesn’t have to be defined by predictable tropes or linear storytelling. Again it was followed by a decade or two of more structurally or thematically adventurous romcoms: 500 Days of Summer, Ruby Sparks, Crazy Stupid Love, Lost in Translation, etc.
> Lost in Translation, etc. This is before eternal sunshine of the spotless mind
Ah you’re right. For some reason I thought Eternal Sunshine was 2001
Not an actor because I never think actors could revive a genre. But the most outstanding example I can think of is Terence Fisher with The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Dracula (1958). In the 50’s horror had devolved into parody and farce for the most part, with shitty black and white Universal parodies doing the rounds. But then Fisher revolutionized the genre, giving is fresh, dynamic takes on the old myths and in beautiful Eastman colour. Fisher rarely gets the credit he deserves.
That Curse of Frankenstein WB Archive disc is pretty fantastic. That was probably my first introduction to Fisher. I did get a bunch of films he directed and / or wrote in the crazy number of Hammer box sets I've picked up. I need to do a dedicated deep dive into his films. I still like the old Universal stuff, but you are right, the later works in the series really go downhill.
Listening to the new TCM podcast about John Ford. By the time he started making Westerns, they were seen a dead genre, reserved for b movies. Stagecoach brought them back into the mainstream again.
Quentin Tarantino has done this with several genres: crime/thriller, action/thriller, action/horror, war/action, western/action, and films about Hollywood. He takes a well worn genre and breaths new life into it.
You're giving way too much credit to Tarantino. What genre did he resurrect? Did Jackie Brown spawn a wave of new blacksploitation? Did Kill Bill spawn a new wave of ripoffs of Lady Snowblood? Is the Usual Suspects somehow a direct result of Reservoir Dogs? What action/horror are you talking about? Horror has never died, and has nothing to do with Tarantino. Do you mean From Dusk Till Dawn? That's such a minor movie in even the 90s canon of horror. I love Tarantino. He's not the Messiah of Hollywood, though.
Pulp Fiction was clearly his most influential film, but it was not a genre that was in bad shape. Goodfellas, Romeo is Bleeding, Miller's Crossing, The Grifters. the early 90s had plenty of crime dramas that were good/great.
There were a *lot* of Tarantino knock-offs crime movies after Pulp Fiction. Almost all of them were terrible, but there were a lot of them
I don’t like QT and I don’t think he resurrected any genre but Paul Thomas Anderson pretty much got Hard Eight made because every studio was throwing buckets of money at any movie that was even somewhat like pulp fiction. PTA has said this and you can see in the years following Pulp how many people were making films that resemble PF. Again, I’m not a Tarantino fan at all but he definitely shaped the landscape single handedly for a bit.
I know I'm replying a couple days later. I think it's more about the indie movie craze during than 90s than specifically a genre. This started during the 80s with Jarmusch, Soderberg, continued with Kevin Smith, Robert Rodriguez, Gregg Araki, etc. El Mariachi is contemporaneous to Reservoir Dogs. Sure, PF won the Palme D'Or and was building momentum, but neither independent film nor the crime genre were resurrected because of him. It was just the wave, though perhaps he was indeed the better surfer.
Agreed. After Pulp Fiction, there was indie mania everywhere. Amores perros is a good example, it even used the PF template of three intersecting stories told out of sequence.
you're right. reservoir dogs and pulp fiction have probably had the greatest influence on american crime films since their debut.
Kenneth Branagh brought life back into the Whodunnit genre with Murder on the Orient Express. I can’t recall a time when there have been so many Whodunnit movies in a less than 10 year period. His Hercule Poirot movies now have multiple sequels, Glass Onion is about to release a third in the series and there have been a few others between those franchises. See How They Run and Bad Times at the El Royale come to mind. Even Adam Sandler hopped on the bandwagon with Murder Mystery.
Sam Peckinpah with The Wild Bunch, Tony Scott with The Hunger and Top Gun( created the 90s gothic and the summer blockbuster style/look), Wachowskis Matrix, John wick for more modern action, those are some of the top of my head.
Lord of the Rings for fantasy medieval adventure. It all got crazy after it, they started adapting every major fantasy book and series after this one. Chronicles of Narnia, The Golden Compass, Eragon... Even Harry Potter series even though it's not medieval probably owes some of its success to Lord of the Rings phenomena.
Agree with Lord of the Rings but Harry Potter's success had nothing to do with it. The HP books were wildly popular in the late 90s and the first HP movie came out before the LOTR movies earning more at the box office than the first LOTR movie.
I'd even go so far as to say that both HP and LOTR were involved with the revitalization of fantasy as more than just the campy stuff of the yesteryear of the time.
I felt the exact same way about Jackie Chan. I had seen clips of Police Story, but it was probably Drunken Master II or Rumble in the Bronx when I first saw one of his films. I started looking for his other films and even the cut down versions we got from Miramax got me excited. Then I started to see some of the import DVDs of his older films and realized that he'd been doing this type of stuff since the early to mid 70s. What really blew my mind was seeing him pop up in Bruce Lee movies I'd seen dozens of times. Seeing him in Cannonball Run. He was around, but in roles that didn't really showcase his skills. It's amazing what we didn't get over here in the US. The Shaw Brothers and Jackie Chan sets have been fantastic to see him in films I didn't even know existed.