ment heated discussions among cinephiles of all generations, argues that the 1990s was the last decade in which films were made for grownups, with complex, adult-based plots, nuanced characters, and meaningful themes.
"I feel like Scott Ryan could have written this directly to me and others in our generation who have basically 'given up' on movies. It is at once tribute and eulogy, so bittersweet." - Screenwriter Helen Childress
(Reality Bites)
"The nineties are lucky to have Scott Ryan." - Actress Natasha Gregson Wagner (
Two Girls and a Guy, Lost Highway)
Ah, the nineties. Movies were something in those days. We're talking about a decade that began with
GoodFellas and ended with
Magnolia, with such films as
Malcolm X, Before Sunrise, and
Clueless arriving somewhere in between. Stories, characters, and writing were king; IP, franchise movies, and supersaturated superhero flicks were still years away. Or so says Scott Ryan, the iconoclastic author of The Last Days of Letterman and Moonlighting: An Oral History, who here turns his attention to
The Last Decade of Cinema--the prolific 1990s. Ryan, who watched just about every film released during the decade when he was a video store clerk in a small town in Ohio, identifies twenty-five unique and varied films from the decade, including
Pretty Woman, Pulp Fiction, Menace II Society,
The Prince of Tides, and
The Shawshank Redemption, focusing with his trademark humor and insight on what made them classics and why they could never be produced in today's film culture. The book also includes interviews with writers, directors, and actors from the era. Go back to the time of VCR's, DVD rentals, and movies that mattered. Turn off your streaming services, put down your phones, delete your Twitter account, and take a look back at the nineties with your
Eyes Wide Shut, a White Russian in your hand, and yell "Hasta la vista, baby" to today's meaningless entertainment. Revel in the risk-taking brilliance of Quentin Tarantino, Amy Heckerling, Spike Lee, Robert Altman, Paul Thomas Anderson, and others in Scott Ryan's magnum opus,
The Last Decade of Cinema.