The Brattle Theatre’s ongoing centennial tribute to Columbia Pictures continues this week with a healthy dose of “Nineties Nostalgia.” By the end of the 20th century, Columbia was perhaps best known for a certain strain of mainstream, midbudget crowd-pleaser (I can certainly remember that famous lady and her torch at the top of some of my favorite family films as a child), but, as this series proves, its output during the decade was as rich and varied as any of today’s indie powerhouses. On Thursday, you can catch two of the most beloved and life-affirming of ’90s comedies – Penny Marshall’s feminist baseball classic “A League of Their Own” (1992) and the Bill Murray time-loop fable “Groundhog Day” (1993) – plus a late-night showing of the delightfully dopey creature feature “Anaconda” (1997). Things take a turn for the darker on Friday with a stalkeriffic double feature: Barbet Schroeder’s “Single White Female” (1992), which has become synonymous in the lexicon with a very specific type of too-creepy roommate, and Ben Stiller’s “The Cable Guy” (1996), which proved, for better or for worse, that Jim Carrey is far more than just Ace Ventura.
For the weekend, the series treads into more auteurist grounds. Saturday sees two of the boldest indie-film debuts of the ’90s. “El Mariachi” (1993) is one of the great marvels of low-budget cinema, a shoestring action thriller that director Robert Rodriguez funded by submitting himself to medical tests; it is paired with “Bottle Rocket” (1996), the indie crime picture that gave us our first glimpse of a young Texan fabulist named Wes Anderson. Sunday brings 4K restorations of John Singleton’s era-defining “Boys n the Hood” (1991) and Martin Scorsese’s overlooked 1993 adaptation of Edith Wharton’s “The Age of Innocence” (these two are not officially presented as a double feature, but I recommend giving it a go anyway). The series closes with a bang Monday with high-octane buddy-picture beat-em-ups: Michael Bay’s “Bad Boys” (1995), starring Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, and Tsui Hark’s “Double Team” (1997), with Jean-Claude Van Damme(!) and basketball great Dennis Rodman(!!!). It’s a suitably eclectic closer to a century of one of our greatest studios.
Of course, most people won’t be thinking about the ’90s next week; they’ll be thinking about the midnight rollover to 2025 from 2024. For those who choose to see in the new year at the movies, The Brattle has a trio of beloved traditions. During the day of Dec. 31, you can catch a matinee of the classic screwball whodunnit “The Thin Man” (1934), starring William Powell and Myrna Loy as the bone-dry bantering sleuths Nick and Nora Charles; even 90 years later, this New Years-set caper remains the equivalent of a dinner party with your most witty and sophisticated friends. If you’d rather dance away the bad vibes of the past year, you can swing by later for Jonathan Demme’s immortal Talking Heads concert film “Stop Making Sense” (1984). And for those of you who would rather go to an actual party, don’t worry: the last screening ends at around 10 p.m., giving you plenty of time to find a place to watch the ball drop in earnest.
If New Years Eve is a time for partying, New Years Day is a time for gentle comforts. To this end, The Brattle has the latest installment of its long-running all-day Marx Brothers marathon. To those of a certain sensibility, Groucho, Harpo, Chico and (I suppose) Zeppo are the equivalent of old friends, and their madcap comic features remain as fleet and funny as any classic Warner Brothers cartoon; the joke-per-minute ratio of the brothers’ opus “Duck Soup” (1933) would remain untouched until the films of Mel Brooks and the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team. “Duck Soup” is of course present in this year’s lineup, which begins at noon and continues until long after the sun goes down, alongside “Animal Crackers” (1930), “A Night at the Opera” (1935) and “Room Service” (1938). As we enter a year when uptight authority figures are more deserving of a pie in the face than ever, there has never been a better time to dabble in Marxism.
Oscar Goff is a writer and film critic based in Somerville. He is film editor and senior critic for the Boston Hassle and his work has appeared in the monthly Boston Compass newspaper and publications such as WBUR’s The ARTery and iHeartNoise. He is a member of the Boston Society of Film Critics, the Boston Online Film Critics Association, and the Online Film Critics Society.
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