1990s

This article was originally published on March 12, 2021.With GameStop’s stock exploding and shrinking on a weekly basis, it’s easy to forget that until recently, it was an open question whether the next-gen of gaming consoles were going to come with an optical drive at all. Physical games managed to avoid the grim reaper, for now, but little care is put into their packaging these days. A whole generation missed out on a time when you could walk into a Babbages and an encyclopedia-sized PC game box practically leapt into…

How did you decide to become a screenwriter? What was the industry like in the late 1980s and early 1990s for a writer? Anjum Rajabali (Courtesy the subject) Frankly speaking, it was a pure accident. Complete coincidence. I never wrote anything as a child; I never thought of myself as a creative person. My association with films was only as a viewer. I enjoyed watching films, and that’s about it. I was in a boarding school in Belgaum for seven years after which I went to Pune for my graduation. I came to Bombay…

Twenty-two years before Brad Pitt’s seemingly happy family life with Angelina Jolie fell apart when he allegedly became violent with her and his children on a private plane ride from Europe, the actor was known to turn “volatile when riled” while working on the 1994 film “Legends of the Fall.” The film’s director, Ed Zwick, reveals Pitt’s inner turbulence, masked by an outwardly “easygoing” demeanor, in his explosive new memoir, “Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood,” which is excepted in…

Anyone who lives through the 1990s knows that it was quite a unique span of time for pop culture, going from the ‘80s excess of Wall Street to the later excess of the Fast and Furious franchise. (Celebrate the latter with our 100 Best Movies of the 2000s.) ‘90s movies gave way to cinematic spectacles through technological leaps and bounds, from Jurassic Park’s live-action dinos to Toy Story’s CGI Rex, with some of the most memorable heroes and villains of any era. (Sometimes in the same movie, Clarice.)Though it can’t be…

In the fall of 2021, filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun found themselves back in their hometown, walking the streets of Ardsley in Westchester County, New York, with a disposable camera in hand. They’d taken a day trip up from Brooklyn in the hopes of revisiting the places that had once defined their adolescence. A lot had changed since their teenage years. Now Schoenbrun was wandering through the town — “a classic American suburb, built to keep people sheltered from the real world,” they say with a laugh — as a trans and…

Back in early November, one of the sections in The King Beat was dedicated to the announcement of a brand new Stephen King Blu-ray from Scream Factory. Following wonderful work done for films including Carrie, Creepshow, The Dead Zone, and more, the boutique home video distributor announced that they would be developing a Collector’s Edition for director Tom Holland’s 1996 film Thinner. I placed a pre-order, and my copy arrived in the mail this week.As I previously expressed in my Adapting Stephen King column about the…

The further we get from the Nineties, the more it looks like a series of musical golden ages all stacked atop one another, a kaleidoscopic moment when grimy hip-hop and future-shock R&B hit artistic and commercial peaks at the same time as a procession of fuzz-pedal-toting rock bands found themselves at the center of pop culture. It was the best-ever era for one-hit wonders, even as major labels — suddenly uncertain in era when Nirvana or Wu-Tang Clan could beat out manicured product — also threw…

Ah, the 1990s. What a fun time for music, (terrible) clothes, and film. The internet was just emerging, and cell phones were derided as tools used only by the pretentious or the money-hungry. Grunge music, punk rock, rap and all things anti-corporate ruled popular culture. Nirvana graced the cover of Rolling Stone, but Kurt Cobain wore a t shirt on the cover that said, “Corporate magazines still suck.” Everybody was trying to out-cool each other by eschewing mainstream culture and values, including corporate culture…

Pulp’s landmark album This Is Hardcore was released in 1998, and photographer Paul Burgess documented the band and video shoots to promote it. A forthcoming book, written and designed by Burgess and Louise Colbourne, contains unseen images, plus interviews with band members and creatives involved in its production. This Is Hardcore: The Cinematic World of Pulp is available to pre-order from Thames & Hudson, published on 23 November…

In its ongoing rush to the future, Apple’s all too eager to ditch the past. That’s a problem with games. On Windows, you can launch ancient fare with some hope it will still work. But even quite recent Mac OS X titles won’t run if they’re 32-bit – and support for anything older than that ended long ago.While Intel OS X games are – currently – not something you can resurrect on a modern Mac, it's possible for old favorites from the Mac’s 68k and PowerPC days to run on your Apple silicon Mac. I had a crack at getting six…