Who doesn't love the early 1990s?

I have seen a lot of good movies in the last few years, but sometimes I think you just can't beat those classic movies of the early and mid 1990s. I just saw Shawshank Redemption last night, which is a damn good movie, and it only took me 13 years to figure that out! While Tim Robbins is always brilliant, I was quite surprised (and may have knew this already) that Stephen King was responsible for the story, because I think of him as the guy who generally turns out shlocky and unoriginal horror (with the exception of the freaky shower heads in It - I give him full credit for scaring the living shit out of the 12 year old me who watched that and has never been able to use a communal shower since. I suppose you could say it was my fault for not exercising better judgement at the time, but fuck, I was 12 - I didn't have better judgement! Anyways Shawshank is more than just a normal prison movie, and luckily I ignored all the hype about the movie at the time, because I really didn't know what was coming at the end. I thought it was almost a little Usual Suspects-ish, until I realized that hey, Usual Suspects came out in 1995 (a year after Shawshank), so maybe Bryan Singer ripped off this movie! Granted Andy Dufresne is no Keyser Soze, but it still has the "how the hell did he do it?" aspect of surprise to the ending. I'm also shocked that I didn't know until last night that a significant part of the plot is regarding the main character setting up a prison library.

Also from the classic world of the 90s, I saw Backdraft tonight, for about the 12th time, but damn, that movie never gets old. Sure it's half testosterone and half schmaltz, but what can you really expect from a Ron Howard movie? I also have fond memories of watching that in my early teens and having my best friend make me rewind (yes, we still had video tapes back then) the shower scene a dozen times so she could see William Baldwin's pubic hair. But it's the melodrama, not the pubic hair, that truly make the movie - along with Donald Sutherland as a crazy pyro who wants to burn the world, Robert De Niro turning in a classic "Uh Brian - I think I got a little problem here" (when he is blown from a building onto a spiky fence), and all the "you go, we go" camaraderie that the manly men can muster. Sure Rescue Me is a much better all around look at firefighters and crazy funny mixed with crazy depressing and fucked up, but I think I'd pick Backdraft if I were forced to declare a champion. It should be noted that Jack McGee plays practically the same character here as he does on Rescue Me ... and I think we owe a round of applause to Mr McGee, who according to IMDB, has been in 126 tv shows and movies since 1985 - wow. That's pretty impressive for a short little fat guy who is fairly non-descript.