Hacker Cinema
Ace Ventura: Pet Detective
1994 · Film · 86 min
Part of Ace Ventura Collection
Directed by Tom Shadyac
He's Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. The Ace is on the case to find the Miami Dolphins' missing mascot and quarterback Dan Marino. He goes eyeball to eyeball with a man-eating shark, stakes out the Miami Dolphins and woos and wows the ladies. Whether he's undercover, under fire or underwater, he always gets his man… or beast!
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7 comments on Hacker News
https://www.imdb.com/search/title/?title_type=feature&release_date=1994-01-01,1994-12-31
Pulp Fiction
Lion King
The Mask
Four Weddings and a Funeral
Dumb and Dumber
The Crow
Speed
True Lies
Interview with the Vampire
Natural Born Killers
Ace Ventura
Stargate
Clerks
The list goes on. Lot's of movies that turned out to be classics or cult classics, or the start of some great careers.
I love Sandler's movies exactly because you know exactly what you get. He's found a formula that works well enough, and has largely stuck to it. He's one of a handful of actors I can go "I'm in the mood for a X movie" about and not care much which movie it is. They're a genre in themselves.
Sure, I know I will groan at how dumb various things are, but that's part of the expectation.
Carey is similar but less so. His span is wider. That hits both ways, Carey at his best have more brilliant performances than Sandler, but it also means that you can be in the mood for Carey, but not Mask and Ace Ventura stupidly over-expressive Carey, for example, so it's harder to just semi-randomly pick one of his movies based on a mood.
The man is actor Jim Carey, it’s a frame from a scene in the Ace Ventura Pet Detective movies. A rhino is giving birth to him.
I’m not necessarily disagreeing with your list, even though some of those are mediocre at best, but yeah I did mean per year, and limited to Hollywood (Parasite for instance not counting). And no, ok, I will also straight up disagree with the second Knives out Movie which I thought was absolute trash. A perfect example of poor storytelling and the form over substance of modern cinema.
But just taking say 1992 you have Last of the Mohicans, The Unforgiven, My Cousin Vinny, Malcolm X, Bad Lieutenant, Scent of a Woman, Reservoir Dogs, Dracula, Chaplin.
And then a bunch of fun schlomp like Arizona Dream, Basic Instinct, Sister Act, Army of Darkness, Home Alone 2, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Mighty Ducks, Wayne’s World.
These are all undoubtedly great movies.
And then another huge bunch of watchable stuff easily comparable to some of your mentions like Watcher or High Life.
And 1992 is not an outlier.
In 1993 you have Jurrasic Park, Groundhog Day, Whats Eating Gilbert Grape, Scindlers List, Meanace 2 Society, Alive, Dazed and Confused, Falling Down, In The Name of The Father, True Romance, Demolition Man, Carlitos Way, The Secret Garden, Philadelphia, A Perfect Workd, Cool Runnings, Short Cuts.
In 1991 Silence of The Lambs, Ternimator 2, JFK, Point Break, Thelma and Louise, Boyz in the Hood, The Doors, My Own Private Idaho, Barton Fink, The Fisher King, Naked Lunch.
In 1990 Goodfellas, Hunt for Red October, Total Recall, Edward Scissorhands, Home Alone, Godfather 3, Dances with Wolves, Tremors, Back to the Future 3, Awakenings, The Witches, Wild at Heart, Jacobs Ladder, Nikita, Slacker, Millers Crossing.
And the quality difference is massive too, not just somewhat better. Like just Millers Crossing is miles better than anything that has been made in the last 5 years, and I’m picking at random.
In 1994 Shawshank Redemption, Pulp Fiction, Forrest Gump, The Lion King, Speed, Ace Ventura, Dumb and Dumber, Stargate, Natural Born Killers, The Crow, Clercs, Maverick, Ed Wood, In the Mouth of Madness, Interview With The Vampire.
I could go on.
And this is not even talking about how the 80s is a better decade for cinema, or how the 70s is the peak of the power of the author with far more experimental, artistic, and substantial productions.
Has quality declined? Yes. Massively. Humongously. Stupendously.
My college roommate memorized a Siegfried and Roy monologue joke that was taken out of Ace Ventura Pet Detective pretty quickly. As far as I’m aware I only ever saw that version one time, so I knew he wasn’t crazy. Interesting thing is that you can still google that joke, but it’s not in the movie.
The shared cultural experience of the movie is lost if everyone has different scenes, if the jokes are different, if the details vary too much.
It would be quite easy to fall into uncanny valley territory.
Fair enough, but I'd hazard a guess that for the majority of people, especially the more urban ones, the only time they even hear about poachers is either in movies (Ace Ventura Pet Detective anyone?) or in articles about elephants/rhinos getting shot for Chinese medicine. You gotta admit the technical definition probably does not completely line up with what Joe Q Public imagines when he hears that word. Somebody shooting a deer out of season is probably not what most people would think of when hearing that word.
I really want to say "that's a nice point", but I'm having a hard time because PSN did this like 4 years ago (but why you would try to "own" a cloud-based piece of media is beyond me). That said, I've only ever bought incredible movies (of course, I'm talking about Fletch, Raising Arizona and Ace Ventura), so I don't understand the desire to "own" movies. Especially since they get re-mastered and HDed and 3Ded and what. It's like owning an LP (which is basically silly (if you consider logic and reason to be friends)).
That said, I'll say: that's a nice point.