The 1990 Retro Hollmann Awards: Part Three

OK, so we've got my Top Ten, part one of the awards, and part two of the awards. Now, the grand finale: part three of the 1990 Retro Hollmann Awards!

The 1990 Retro Hollmann Awards: Part Two

Continuing to wrap up 1990 after the Top Ten and Day One of 1990 Retro Hollmann Awards. Three acting categories lie ahead, let's go:

The 1990 Retro Hollmann Awards: Part One

This is the first of three posts this week, each dedicated to the 1990 Retro Hollmann Awards. No, I did not make a separate nominations announcement, all will be revealed as we go category by category. Get familiar with my Top Ten of this year, come back, and enjoy.

The first six categories:

Top Ten of 1990

Here's to the Honorable Mentions: Alice, Cinema Paradiso, King of New York, Miller's Crossing, Mr. & Mrs. Bridge, Postcards from the Edge, Reversal of Fortune, and to my #11, Mermaids. They almost made it to this Top Ten and, in the years to come, some may wind up becoming more dear to me than the films below. As of today, though, after 75 films and much consideration, these are my Top Ten Films of 1990 - in alphabetical order:

1990: A Qualified Success

When is a hit not a hit? This is a question that has long dogged the legacy of Dick Tracy, a film that had the biggest opening weekend in Disney history, made about $103 million in the US alone, ended the year as the #9 film of 1990, and tied with The Godfather Part III as the second most-nominated film at the 63rd Academy Awards - yet still awaits a sequel. Now, you and I know a studio, especially Disney, will greenlight three sequels and a spin-off TV show if they make a penny's profit. So what happened with Dick Tracy?

Money, honey. Director-producer-star Warren Beatty was infamous for budget overruns and this was no different, as he went about $20 million or so over budget. Additionally, Disney, inspired by the marketing blitz for 1989's Batman, spent millions on toys, tie-ins, and other products, like Dick Tracy watches, Dick Tracy clocks, Dick Tracy coloring books, and so on: they sold, but not as much as Disney had hoped (though, as a child, I inherited my older cousins' Dick Tracy and Mumbles action figures, which I later gifted to my younger cousins; where are they now, I wonder?). Variety reported the total cost of making and marketing the film was about $101 million...and it is said that a movie has to make twice its budget to earn a profit. It's since gained a kind of cult status, thanks to its style and its run on television (can you believe they used to allow Madonna's nipples during the day on network TV just because they were behind negligee in a PG-rated Disney flick??). 

Was it any good though? I'll get to that somewhere down below, amidst the other Spring 1990 releases.

1990: Adults Only

On the "Erotic '90s" season of her hit Hollywood history podcast You Must Remember This, Karina Longworth delves into the history of the NC-17 rating. Put briefly, NC-17 was created to replace the old X rating, a designation for adults-only entertainment - like, say, Midnight Cowboy or A Clockwork Orange - that came to be associated with hardcore pornography. Newspapers gradually refused to advertise X-rated films, theater chains refused to show them, and video rental stores refused to stock them. Studios began "neutering" their more risk-raking films, while arthouse and indie films found themselves trapped, not always able to afford appeals and re-edits. Many found critical acclaim...but no release.

One such film was Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. The character study of the titular serial killer and his spree through the rattier edges of Chicago was always going to be a tough sell, no matter what decade it was made in, but it spent four years looking for distribution even while it continued to garner positive reviews - including one from Roger Ebert himself! But distributors wanted a guaranteed R rating, something that the film, with its cavalcade of horrors including rape, murder, incest, and pederasty, was struggling to get. Not only did the MPAA give it an X rating, they told the filmmakers there were not enough cuts that could be made to make it releasable without it. An unedited, unrated version was finally released, one city at a time: good reviews, good box office (it made back six times its budget), even five nominations at the Independent Spirit Awards. Still, it was a four-year road, all due to the stigma of the X.

Even if one received a theatrical release, there was still the home video market to consider. Take The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, a British arthouse flick about a crude gangster who buys a swank restaurant, only for his wife to use it for assignations with a more genteel individual: a flick of food and fucking, in other words. While this masterpiece had a modest reception in its native Britain, the controversy over its material and subsequent unrated release gave it enough publicity to make it millions in the USA. But large chains like Blockbuster had their own policies about stocking films that were or were almost deemed X by the MPAA; to get around this, Miramax released two versions on VHS. The first was the original theatrical cut; the other, an R-rated version that ran 30 minutes shorter for wider video release. 

Miramax seemed to have enough, and it took on the MPAA with the release of Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!. Directed by Pedro Almodóvar and starring Antonio Banderas as a hot but unwell young man who kidnaps his favorite porn actress (a terrific Victoria Abril, executing a highwire act of terrified and turned on) in the hopes of making her fall in love with him, it was already was a hit in its native Spain, where it became the country's #1 film of the year. It's a dark comedy, a melodrama, a romance: it's provocative, to say the least - and for the sin of including a woman both using the toilet and experiencing sexual pleasure, it was slapped by the Motion Picture Association of America with an X rating. Miramax took the MPAA to court, arguing that the outdated ratings system was failing to distinguish art from pornography, sabotaging the business - and, frankly, seemed to be exercising its power over foreign and independent films in particular, films willing to take on subject matter the major Hollywood studios wouldn't touch.

Miramax lost its case, but that same year, the MPAA came up with a new rating: NC-17. Standing for "No Children Under 17", it was supposed to be a more respectable alternative, signifying that something was strictly for adults but not necessarily pornography. Still, as Miramax complained, the designation seemed reserved more for adult films focusing on sex rather than on hyperviolence.

This certainly seems to be the case with the first film released bearing the NC-17 designation, Henry & June, a biopic based on the diaries of Anaïs Nin, detailing her relationship with Henry Miller (author of Tropic of Cancer) and his wife June. It's a patient, beautifully-shot movie, whose sex scenes are, yes, erotic and character-building, whose plotting and philosophy are absolutely geared to an over-17 adult sensibility. Yet when mainstream critics viewed it, they dismissed it as a big tease - the consensus seemed to be that the rating was a big tease, as the film didn't have enough sex or nudity or eroticism to maintain an audience member's interest. Ah, well. The film went on to gross over $11 million in the US and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Cinematography.

Studios still try to avoid NC-17 much like they did the X, but it still pops up every now and then. Some recent famous examples: Shame and Killer Joe (2011), Blue is the Warmest Color (2013), and Blonde (2022), whose star Ana de Armas was nominated for Best Actress. Exhibitors are still wary of screening them since the rating automatically limits their ticket sales; its reputation for being reserved for hypersexual films doesn't help, either. It's not just that studios need to grow some balls: audiences need to grow up.

Anyway! Sunday we start delving into the movies themselves, in order of release. And we begin with the movie that made Julia Roberts a star...

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