one time there were two magician movies

Knew soref would have some valuable input itt btw

Apparently there are two Jungle Book movies coming out soon.

this is funny to me cause i was recently thinking about a terrible poll idea where you'd have to pick the best pairing of (1) armageddon and volcano (2) armageddon and dante's peak (3) deep impact and volcano (4) deep impact and dante's peak. (obviously 4 is the right answer but not by much.)

superhero movies kinda more like a genre/trend though right? like it's kinda like saying "there were all these years when a million westerns came out" or whatever. disaster movies were everywhere in the early/mid 70s, grand car race movies in the late 70s/early 80s.

but it's interesting when they seem to pop up out of their element, like the astro-comet movies and the volcano movies didn't seem like part of a disaster movie trend (though maybe in hindsight they were?) but as astro-comet and volcano movies and very weird for that. as for big car chase movies - - - maybe the gone in 60 seconds remake and the first fast and the furious, but those were admittedly a full year apart (june 2000 - june 2001). i think the most interesting ones are where you can sorta work backwards to how it might have happened - like clearly there must have been a big mid-90s time magazine story about scientists predicting an asteroid could hit the earth and it set some screenwriters' wheels turning. one went for a conventional disaster movie with people in different walks of life dealing with shit (and played up the what-would-you-do-if-you-knew-the-world-would-end angle, though not as effectively as it might have) while the other is really a team-on-a-mission movie with a more emotionally manipulative but godawful stupid set of plot developments and aerosmith.

volcano and dante's peak is weirder, because dante's peak (though the slightly better-constructed and considerably more watchable movie) feels more like the ripoff: we've heard these other guys are doing a volcano movie, what have we got? and they dust off a shelved early 1980s script inspired by mount st. helens but vetoed for budgetary or "disaster pictures are old news" reasons. but then "volcano" is the one without anything like an actual volcano which makes me wonder if THEY heard about dante's peak and decided they had to make theirs more different. also they could save money that way. man what a stupid movie.

wyatt earp/tombstone on the other hand, i think just reflects the mini-wave of 90s westerns. picking the same old west guy as protagonist is a little funny but i could see how it would happen by accident. there aren't THAT many famous sheriffs.

Made the choice not to click the tv tropes link cause it ruins the parlour game bank holiday shitlisting but also because I find that site depressing xps

agreed

I think maybe the volcano movies were part of a mini disaster movie trend but my only evidence for this is twister

superhero movies kinda more like a genre/trend though right? like it's kinda like saying "there were all these years when a million westerns came out" or whatever. disaster movies were everywhere in the early/mid 70s, grand car race movies in the late 70s/early 80s.

Agree with this. Though having said that, there's something nagging at my mind that, was there a very similar film to Duel that came out around the same time? I'm sure my brain is telling me there was but I don't know if I can trust myself on this one.

I remember one called The Car, I think that was similar.

scratch that, it was '77

Well, as my memory is so bad it could be what I was thinking of, though having looked it up on wikipedia I don't think it was that as I'm pretty sure I'd remember the detail of it being some sort of demonic car that couldn't enter consecrated ground.

Goodfellas and My Blue Heaven both from 1990 and both based on the life of Henry Hill

according to wiki While Goodfellas was based upon the book Wiseguy by Nicholas Pileggi, the screenplay for My Blue Heaven was written by Pileggi's wife, Nora Ephron, and much of the research for both works was done in the same sessions with Hill.

Ephron also wrote the script for Cookie which was another mobster comedy from 1989 idk if that was another mini-trend

late 90s mini disaster movie trend is pretty much there, with roland emmerich as the critical irwin allen figure without whom there's no trend at all: independence day, day after tomorrow, i guess godzilla, and then the late hangover of 2012. rewatched twister a few years ago and man that hasn't dated well at all - effects lookin' real shabby but also almost all the dialogue is bill paxton repeating himself: "we've got to go! (pause) we've got to go now!" etc. also a truly thankless role for jami gertz as the citified new fiancee who somehow doesn't know anything about or understand bill paxton's driving life passion of chasing tornadoes with his folksy ragtag bunch including philip seymour hoffman and an extremely doomed quirky den-mother character. basically paxton seems like an asshole. screenplay was by crichton which makes me wonder if jurassic park might be understood as something like a disaster movie.

elaction (1999) was a fillum about a female secondary character that has a scene where she swings on a swing set to represent the tension between lost youth /coming of age dynamics and i swear there was another contemporary joint that utilized the same device so they're the same movie but i can't remember what the other one was just now, but i randomly watched them in succession so it counts

The Ice Storm?

Ha I have this whole thing in my head about twister and jurassic park that I'm not good at expressing but the tornado is the T. rex

Mostly sonically cause the cry of the tyrannosaur in Jurassic park has this metal-on-metal squeal that you hear a lot in twister

i mean it's definitely as much a post-JP greenlight as congo.

mix of "audiences go for this kind of thrill ride" and "we have the technology now!" thinking.

(Twister is a bad film obv, yeah)

Twister is no good, but it was less painful than its contemporary Independence Day.

Which reminds me, '96 also saw two "John Travolta is magic" movies.

Kind of love independence day

How bad was Summer '96 for movies? I actually remember enjoying The Rock.

man, a phenomenon / michael double feature might be the least appealing billing of any of the pairs mentioned on this thread so far. tbh i've never seen either one but i remember both just radiating "touching" in a really depressing way.

independence day is super problematic but super watchable. certainly way more memorable scenes, characters, visuals, jokes than any of the other 90s disaster films.

I remember lots of people pointing out at the time that Mars Attacks! and Independence Day have very similar plots/concepts

Even back when I was the audience for most of the big releases (I was 17-turning-18 in '96), I still knew well enough to avoid that Travolta twofer.

Nathan Rabin is braver than I.

Dissuading details from Wikipedia: Contrary to popular depictions of angels, Michael is portrayed as a boozing, smoking slob – yet capable of imparting unexpected wisdom.[1]

Xxxp Jokes is the main one imo, it's the only one where emmerich's strict adherence to "in every ____ ever" formula lands, because the actors sell the types

Also remember outside of the states the July 4th stuff plays as comedy, 100%

it plays as comedy to me too! i mean i am definitely not putting it forth as a movie that'll really stir your heart and make you proud to be an american or whatever. but man is it fun watching will smith and company flying jet fighters at UFOs, or bill pullman in the creepy area 51 basement with the slimy tentacle alien and brent spiner.

michael rogin's BFI book on the film is a good read too btw.

Would read

Also remember outside of the states the July 4th stuff plays as comedy, 100%

This reminds me of something I've been thinking about for a while. All the foreign films that make it to the US and get reviewed by the mainstream press seem to be of the "good for you" variety - earnest dramas about prejudice and sorrow, heartfelt tales of the human condition, blah blah blah. But I'm convinced other countries produce just as many dumbshit popcorn movies as America, proportionally - I just never hear about them. So in other countries' big dumb action movies, is there the same amount of hyperbolic nationalism and flag-waving? Is there a French equivalent to Michael Bay? And without totally hijacking this thread, what are the stupidest, most crowd-pleasingly boneheaded foreign movies folks can think of that I might want/need to see?

Feel like American chauvinism expressed via Hollywood is a fairly distinct phenomenon with few analogues? But as regards dumbshit patriotic films we could be here all day

xp

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yysbbPStfWw

There was also a Sylvester Stallone disaster movie in 1996 or 1997 where people got caught in a car tunnel, I remember seeing that one at the cinema.

Daylight!

That came just after cliffhanger - in both he plays a character haunted by flashbacks of a disaster he failed to prevent

Oh yeah, Daylight, that was from 1996 too.

It seems weird that several neo-disaster movies came out in 1996 already: Daylight, Tornado!, Independence Day, Twister... Considering the production time for your regular feature, it seems like there should be some ur-example that inspired this fad? Maybe it was indeed Jurassic Park? Or Speed? Or maybe they were all already anticipating Titanic, which must've been in the works for quite some time?

xp and that disaster was called "Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot!"

THANK YOU AND GOODNIGHT

xpost
Was the success of Titanic always a foregone conclusion, though? I mean, the odds were in its favour--Cameron had been having a monster 90s (correct me if I'm wrong, but I think The Abyss was his only major film that underperformed according to expectations), but it was still a wildly expensive production featuring two non-superstar leads. Hard to imagine now, of course, but I think there was always the potential for it to flop.

Everyone thought it would flop iirc.

Including me (and my parents), when we saw it during its like first or second week. Like people in the theatre (a suburban multiplex, not at all some hipster enclave) were laughing at the dialogue, Billy Zane's acting, etc.

Dark city, matrix, existenz, gattica

Yeah famously it had been building up a follywood rep before its release xxp

there were 2 near-simultaneous Hitchcock biopics a couple of years ago

seem to recall 2 Truman Capote biopics a couple of years before that?

Yep

Despicable me and megamind

megamind wasn't about truman capote

black hawk down / behind enemy lines (both 2001)

Braveheart (1995)
Rob Roy (1995)

dont tell me there's some comic book guy called the Magician

http://static.comicvine.com/uploads/scale_large/0/3125/1197318-fb19.jpg