For actors and film-lovers, the 1990s were a prosperous period. Sundance was as much as Seattle was to grunge rockers as an individual writer. Filmmakers have been able to tackle topics that have only been around for the last few decades. “Fight clubs and foul-mouthed clerks were there, imaginative cannibal serial assassins, and” Choose Life!
1. The Big Lebowski
The Coen Brothers have made a tradition of switching between drama and humor and everything in-between, but The Big Lebowski sticks out as the best comedy pair to date and may be among their best overall. The genre-busting neo-noir crime comedy tells the story of Jeffrey “The Dude” Lebowski (Jeff Bridges) who finds himself entangled in a classic black mystery despite being the last one to deal with it. The Big Lebowski is strongly influenced by Raymond Chandler’s pulp crime fiction, which has informed many black and neo-noir films before it, but here we have the chance to see insane scenarios unfold when the person least prepared to withstand the heat finds himself at the core of it all.
2. Election
Tracy Flick’s obnoxiously plucky Reese Witherspoon is eager to win the student council president position at her Omaha High School. Matthew Broderick is a civics teacher who tries to stand in her way, persuading the famous jock (Chris Klein) to run an opposition effort. Illicit dealings, diplomatic treachery, and one very awkward looking bee-sting managed to render Alexander Payne’s genius black comedy a critical success. His gleefully subversive screenplay, written with long-standing partner Jim Taylor and adapted from Tom Perrotta’s book, was nominated for Oscar. Any similarity between the characters here and the real-life politicians is, of course, entirely coincidental.
3. Tommy Boy
The best elements in a friend’s movie and a road video. Tommy (Chris Farley) is fighting to rescue his family company with the help of his long-time friend Richard (David Spade). Farley’s physical humor is good, and Spade’s sarcasm is the reverse. Rob Lowe is also giving a nice, amusing show all the time. This, along with Black Sheep (1996), had tragic moments in between the slapstick and the crude satire, which revealed just how fine the actor Farley was. If you learn something from this show, it’s that true friend is there for you no matter what, and you still take the butcher’s word for it.
4. Dogma
Matt Damon and Ben Affleck play fallen angels exiled to Wisconsin, who are hoping to get back to heaven on a loophole, which would sadly disprove God’s infallibility and undo all life. With the aid of Jay and Silent Bob as prophets and Chris Rock playing the thirteenth apostle Rufus, an abortion clinic psychologist does what she has to do to rescue the world from nullification. It also features the late George Carlin as a Cardinal who attempted to rebrand Catholicism by adding the Friend Christ and Alanis Morissette into the role of God.
5. There’s Something About Marry
Featuring an all-star ensemble of Cameron Diaz, Ben Stiller, Matt Dillon, and a host of other unforgettable supporting stars, There’s Something About Mary reveals the story of Ted (Stiller) and his quest to win back Mary (Diaz), the girl he lost in high school.
But back to There’s Something About Mary, this is a film with a dam of classic moments: a hair gloss, a zipper crash, a killer hitchhiker with a genius concept of seven-minute abs. What might make the film the best of the lot, too, is that it seems the most straightforward when it comes to the main plot and the wonderful comic parts that accompany it. If you’re going for There’s Something About Mary or Dumb & Dumber, or Kingpin, as the best Farrelly Brothers movie, nobody’s going to disagree.
6. My Cousin Vinny
My cousin Vinny stars Joe Pesci as Vinny — a personal injury lawyer from Brooklyn who has just passed the bar during his sixth try. If Vinny’s cousin and a buddy are charged in the Alabama murder they didn’t commit, he becomes the best hope they have to be exonerated considering the fact that he’s never been to a court of law. My cousin Vinny is sometimes lost in the ’90s comedy shuffle, often better regarded as a film in which Tomei received the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Yet the film is one of the best films of the decade, comedy or otherwise. The root of the film’s satire derives from the conflicts between the Brash, the New York working-class characters in the film, and the traditional Southerners in Alabama.
7. Office Space
It wasn’t a success when it was released, this film has since become a cult classic. Published and directed by Mike Judge, this is about a guy named Peter (Ron Livingston) and his buddies who are sick of their employer and their work and want to do anything to change it. It proves that you don’t need a million dollars to do anything about it. It asks the question: how perfect is the minimal amount of flair? It reveals that you can’t place a price on the essence of pleasure, or on a red stapler. It’s not hard to see the similarities between this film and the Judge’s new Silicon Valley. Mike Judge’s comedy is often humorous, and sometimes too serious. If that’s the case, so the idiocracy can be scary.
8. Wayne’s World
Still, the most popular film version of the Saturday Night Live sketch to date, Mike Myers and Dana Carvey’s most outstanding feature-length break takes their titular public-access goofballs to the big screen, complete with a slick corporate boss (Rob Lowe), a gleeful skewer of product placement and a “choose your own adventure” style finish. It is endlessly quotable (“Schwing”), and an incredible show of the way to combine a headbanging dude with the sincerest pleasure, a “Bohemian Rhapsody” sing along with the other. It is an extremely onomatopoetic “Babe Abraham Lincoln!” It’s what she said! That is what you should vote on.
9. Multiplicity
A film that took together many genres of film, Multiplicity is a science fiction romantic comedy directed by legendary actor Harold Ramis. Michael Keaton plays a construction worker who feels like he’s stretched way too thin, hops on the chance to clone himself so that he can divide and conquer. A sequence of events led him to have three copies, two of which reflect separate facets of his personality, and the third to be a duplicate of a duplicate with the mentality of an “excessively interested kid.” Somewhat expensive due to the special effects his story had requested, Multiplicity was unable to make much money due to that fact, and the majority of critics and filmgoers were squandered.
10. Four Rooms
Some of the best helmers don’t get it right every time. With talented directors like Allison Anders, Alexandre Rockwell, Robert Rodriguez, and Quentin Tarantino behind the scenes, Four Rooms are meant to be a major deal. The film was split into four brief comic segments. While talented stars like Tim Roth, Bruce Willis, Madonna, Antonio Banderas, and Marisa Tomei starred in the movie, Four Rooms barely made $4 million in the box office. If that wasn’t frustrating enough, if you ask the average movie fan about the performance, you might expect to see a perplexed or blank face in return.
