In Which DuJour Means Crash Positions If I were a person to make broad and sweeping generalizations (which is definitely not a thing that writers on the internet do) I would say that the culture of the 90’s was defined … Continue reading Millennial Malaise 19: Josie and the Pussycats
In Which We Accept the Reality of the World We Are Presented Throughout this series we have come across movies about social alienation, the feeling of no control, angst at the post Cold War world order, and fear over how … Continue reading Millennial Malaise 18: The Truman Show
In Which the Cookie Stand is Not Part of the Food Court. For the chronically online you may have noticed an odd story/meme circulating through the social media sphere about the new Avengers movie. The long and short of the … Continue reading Millennial Malaise 17: Mallrats
In Which Discrimination is Down to a Science Out of all the sci-fi films covered in this series so far Gattaca stands out. Not for being the best of the bunch (I would still throw that honor to Strange Days … Continue reading Millennial Malaise 16: Gattaca
In Which We’re All Back From Hell The comic book films of the 90’s were incredibly reactionary. After the earth shattering success of 1989’s Batman the industry was put on high alert that a new genre of blockbusters were open … Continue reading Millennial Malaise 15: Spawn
In Which it Feels Good to Feel Again The influence of The Matrix is monumental. Nearly every action movie released in the last 20 years is in conversation with it in some way. Either aping its stylistic techniques directly or … Continue reading Millennial Malaise 14: Equilibrium
In Which it’s Turtles All the Way Down. With a few rare exceptions it’s a bad sign when a movie focuses so much on architecture. Now I’m not talking about the camera lingering on intricate production design or focussing in … Continue reading Millennial Malaise 13: The Thirteenth Floor
In Which We Go Down the Rabbit Hole This article won’t be about The Matrix. No, you don’t need another thousand words dissecting the filmmaking, the performance, the philosophy, or the themes. The past 20 years have provided a veritable … Continue reading Millennial Malaise 12: The Matrix
In Which the World is What We Make It Sci-fi in the late 20th century was obsessed with memory, or more specifically how memory impacts the basic concept of human nature. That a collection of experiences can build identity, are … Continue reading Millennial Malaise 11: Dark City
In which memory is not reality Talking about anime online is equivalent to walking into a field of anthills and wildly swinging a baseball bat about. You’re bound to hit on something while simultaneously upsetting large groups of people. For … Continue reading Millennial Malaise 10: Ghost in the Shell
In Which Keanu Needs to Get Online! Why is Johnny Mnemonic primarily set in Newark, New Jersey? Yes America’s 70th largest city is the hub of all cyber shenanigans in the far off future of 2021. Newark (or the Free … Continue reading Millennial Malaise 09: Johnny Mnemonic
In Which We’ve Met Before There was a period in the late 90’s where the Internet seemed like it could be anything. The moment between the release of the first hypertext web browsers and the dot-com bubble bursting was a … Continue reading Millennial Malaise 08: You’ve Got Mail
In Which We’re On TV Deep in the recesses on 90s culture a monster was born. A cruel demander, who we all noticed, but refused to take seriously. A beast of unfathomable hunger and power, which could alter and shift … Continue reading Millennial Malaise 07: Natural Born Killers
In Which We’re California Dreaming As a place and cultural entity Hong Kong serves as a kind of inflection point for the other aspects of 90’s culture that we have yet to cover. The ideas of urban isolationism, receding colonialism, … Continue reading Millennial Malaise 06: Chungking Express
In Which Hawke’s the Last Real Thing You Got The culture of the United States in the 90s was one based around the inability to properly define conflict. For the past 80 years of American history there had always been … Continue reading Millennial Malaise 05: Reality Bites
In Which Cyber Christ Is Born Why was the culture at large obsessed with virtual reality in the 90s? It’s slightly befuddling, especially with the benefit of hindsight, that a technology that is just barely functional at a mass level … Continue reading Millennial Malaise 04: The Lawnmower Man
In which the planet is hacked. In its own way 1995’s Hackers serves as a kind of aesthetic and cultural apotheosis of the concept of the 90s. Here’s a movie that signifies so much of the look and ideology of … Continue reading Millennial Malaise 03: Hackers
What is the point of militias? Intellectually I understand them, they are outlets for paranoia, outrage, reactionary politics, and blunt power fantasies. But what goals do they actually hope to achieve. Would they actually want an apocalypse or military coup … Continue reading Movie Review: The Standoff at Sparrow Creek
In which information will control the world In Chuck Klosterman’s book But What if We’re Wrong? he recounts a bit of reading from a 1980 edition of the Book of Predictions. In it he’s confronted with the speculations of futurists … Continue reading Millennial Malaise 02: Sneakers
In Which the Future is Divined With MiniDiscs Science fiction has always served as a great predictor, with pieces speculating on things like cyberspace, mobile telecommunications, and AI with shocking prescience. The amusing thing about those speculations are the limits … Continue reading Millennial Malaise 01: Strange Days
Twenty years ago was 1999. Now, on balance the year itself was nothing too notable. Between the political bickering of the Clinton impeachment (he was acquitted in February of ’99), and events like the bursting of the dot-com bubble and … Continue reading Millennial Malaise 00: What It Is
