Nineties Feel Good Movies

When the pandemic hit in March of 2020 my son Max, 31 at the time, was living in Santa Fe. Just as so many other Gen X and millennial livelihoods and lifestyles (I don’t like to use that word but I’m afraid it does kind of apply to many in these age groups) were severely impacted by the stay-at-home restrictions and shutdowns, so was Max. He made it through the summer, riding his bike, meeting a small group of friends at outside parties, hanging with Jakob, Lulu, Marcos and me in the park, and playing poker on a few websites that still exist (online poker was shut down in the U.S., forcing Max to play at casinos).

But as winter came on bringing renewed shut downs, he started coming up to El Valle to stay with me for a few days to decompress. Max, raised as was Jakob, in an environment where the main forms of entertainment were hiking and backpacking in the summer and skiing in the winter, substituted these activities as an adult with city ones: going to the gym, movies, parties, restaurants and bars. To my surprise, he discovered that he actually liked being here, walking my dogs, whom he loves (he desperately wants a dog of his own), bringing in the wood, then cross-country and downhill skiing with me once the snow fell (not enough yet).

We also found an indoor activity in which we could indulge: watching 90s feel good movies. I’ve often watched these movies, geared to a general audience before the onslaught of super hero movies (only Star Wars), as an antidote to the blues, with their familiar movie stars, their funny/sad narratives, their blur between the ordinary and extraordinary. Max, jangled enough by the events of the day, found that they worked wonders on his nerves as well.

We started with High Fidelity. There may be no greater comedic role than the one Jack Black creates as the clerk in the vinyl record shop who doesn’t let customers buy any music he thinks is crap. If he had his druthers, it wouldn’t be in the shop in the first place, but the boss of the shop is John Cusack, who also has impeccable musical taste but is a little less judgmental. Max kept calling him a jerk as he meets up with former girlfriends to explore the demise of their relationships as a means of parsing the one he’s just fucked up. But I love John Cusack, not only for the quirky roles he plays in the movies but the role he plays in real life: he went with Arundhahti Roy and Daniel Ellsberg to interview Edward Snowden stuck in Moscow after his release of National Security Administration documents revealing the extent of national surveillance and war crimes. The sound track of the movie, is, of course, straight out of my playlists, which Cusack makes endlessly, like I do, of songs that are the records of our lives.

We next watched Moonstruck, which apparently thousands, if not millions, of other people in America were also watching during the pandemic. There were articles in the New York Times Magazine (Wesley Morris) and in the New Yorker about the joy of watching Cher kick the can down the streets of Brooklyn after going to the opera with Nicholas Cage (they are both stunningly beautiful). It’s basically an Italian soap opera that plays fast and loose with reality: Cher agrees to marry Johnny Cammareri, whom she doesn’t love, and then agrees to marry Ronny Cammareri, his brother, after knowing him for two days. But it seeps right into your heart as scene after scene is exquisitely played by the likes of Vincent Gardenia, Cher’s father, who makes a very good living as a plumber by convincing clients they need copper pipes; Olympia Dukakis, Cher’s mother, who wants to know why men cheat on women (her husband is having an affair); and John Mahoney as the clueless NYU professor who keeps getting drinks thrown in his face by young students he’s trying to seduce.

We went onto the The Paper, Michael Keaton’s best movie, IMHO, with the wonderful Marisa Tomei, and Groundhog Day. There’s not much I can add to the latter’s position in the movie canon: “Fantasies work because at some level they act as a metaphor and help us relate to the real life. And the best way a fantasy could work is to be subtle and allow the viewer to make his own metaphor. Groundhog Day is in that way, a great movie. It plays like a comedy while giving a feel of philosophical undercurrents which resonate deeply within us.” (Nallasivan Valasubramanian). There are many more movies to be had: Crimes of the Heart, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and An Ideal Husband, to name a few. I have them all on VHS if you can’t find them on Netflix or Hulu or Criterion or wherever. There’s something to be said for keeping your own video library. Let me know if you want to borrow one.