Nonfiction, Television, Performing Arts
Date Published: Tuesday, June 18, 2024
Publisher: Fayetteville Mafia Press, 2024 (FMP Publishing)
“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.
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