Men in Black (1997)
Directed by Barry Sonnenfeld
After a police chase with an otherworldly being, a New York City cop is recruited as an agent in a top-secret organization established to monitor and police alien activity on Earth: the Men in Black. Agent K and new recruit Agent J find themselves in the middle of a deadly plot by an intergalactic terrorist who has arrived on Earth to assassinate two ambassadors from opposing galaxies.
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Sonnenfeld's film is just good enough to remind us how lazy most blockbusters have become in the decade since Gremlins and Ghostbusters - hits with a similar hip, relaxed vibe.
At times the ambience evokes the work of Gremlins director Joe Dante; don't expect any psychological depth here, but the cool wit and fun (derived partly from the premise that the cheap tabloids are the only newspapers telling the truth) are deftly maintained, and Sonnenfeld provides a bountiful supply of both fanciful beasties and ingenious visuals.
That’s what keeps it from being in the same class as “Beetlejuice” or “The Frighteners.”
He has cribbed from Tim Burton (the Beetlejuicey score is by Danny Elfman, the striking sets by Bo Welch), but he has also learned what not to do: The script (based on a comic by Lowell Cunningham) is elegantly shaped, without an extraneous beat, and there's a generosity toward even the most degenerate beasties from beyond.
If you saw Joe Dante's 1985 River Phoenix/Ethan Hawke movie, "Explorers," you won't be terribly surprised by their rubbery, globby appearance.
Most odd-couple partnerships rely on pairing a sensible "straight man" with an offbeat "color character" (e.g., Danny Glover and Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon; Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker in Rush Hour).
Great special effects, inventive alien designs and Smith and Jones's hip, hilarious double act make director Barry Sonnenfeld's Lethal Weapon-style buddy picture a fast-paced pleasure.
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In transit, Jones calmly sings along with a cassette of Elvis doing The Promised Land, while the screaming Smith searches hysterically for his seat belt.
Of course, given that we hardly recall most of those other movies even with the haze of nostalgia, while Ghostbusters remains as iconic a pop culture touchstone as any other movie from that decade (I can wax all the rhapsodic I want to over The Princess Bride , for example, but must always finally acknowledge that nobody - or only a teeny number of people - would be breathlessly excited for a first-person Princess Bride video game in this day and age), I don't mean to suggest that its big-budget somehow makes it a shallower thing: the very reason for its longevity has everything to do with its "bigness", its costly high-concept ambition which lends the film a kind of grandeur and impressiveness that sets off its resolutely intimate, human-sized comedy and makes it seem all the funnier for the contrast (a similar dynamic drives Men in Black , which has long struck me as the last of the great '80s action-comedies, stranded out in the back half of the 1990s).
Comparisons with Ghostbusters have been making the rounds, but Sonnenfeld's film lacks the sheer joyful enthusiasm of that Ivan Reitman production.
Director Barry Sonnenfeld and screenwriter Ed Solomon have concocted an absurdist melange of knowing pop cultural references and nutty situation comedy that owes as much to David Letterman's skewed cynicism as it does to "Total Recall" or "Batman."
Given its director and stars, Men in Black should have been a wacko classic to put alongside Ghostbusters and The Hidden (this movie's basic parents).
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As in Alien Nation, aliens live more or less peaceably among us; they make up an underclass of cab drivers, pawnshop owners, and even the odd celebrity or two.
(Welch created similarly memorable havens in 1996's The Birdcage and 1997's Men in Black .)