Hacker Cinema
Interview with the Vampire
1994 · Film · 123 min
Part of The Vampire Chronicles Collection
Directed by Neil Jordan
A vampire relates his epic life story of love, betrayal, loneliness, and dark hunger to an over-curious reporter.
1 positive3 neutralfrom 4 commenters
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4 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’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.
The books are a little strange. Interview with the Vampire is the most normal one. As I read through the rest of the series, it became more and more obvious that she was madly in love with her own character the vampire Lestat (Tom Cruise in the movie).
Everyone who meets Lestat (including Satan himself) becomes obsessed with him, and it feels like it's not so much because the character is super interesting but because the author has a lady-boner for him. You start to feel like a voyeur reading some really personal love letters adapted into novels.
It's very strange how memory works.
The first few paragraphs I thought - "yes, I remember this". But once I got farther into it, I realized it was definitely Shaq's Kazaam that I was misremembering.
However--I would never have thought it was Sinbad at all, if the article had not suggested it first.
I'm not sure if that says more about the nature of memory, or the power of suggestion.
Perhaps fading memory combined with strong and 'seemingly accurate' suggestion is quite a powerful thing. There are tons of examples of this.
For example, was that old Tom Cruise movie called "Interview with A Vampire" or "Interview with THE Vampire"? Like 'Shazaam', many people say that at some point the movie title changed. But there's no evidence of that at all.
Perhaps my all time favorite story about the strangeness of memory is more relevant than ever. Borges' story, "Shakespeare's Memory". Read aloud for the New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/fiction-podcast-hisham-matar-reads-jorge-luis-borges
Basically, a writer is magically given Shakespeare's memories. "But he soon discovers that memory is a slippery thing, 'not a summation, it is a chaos of vague possibilities.'"
The greatest labyrinth of all might just be the mind.