1990 is the logical place to start recapping the 90's for reasons other than the obvious; it's here where blockbusters started behaving in odd ways. For every expected star vehicle which performed according to expectations (DIE HARD 2: DIE HARDER), there were several which either disappointed (QUICK CHANGE, the Bill Murray caper movie) or crashed and burned (DICK TRACY). In fact, the biggest hits of the year were films starring people like Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore (GHOST) or Richard Gere (PRETTY WOMAN), who hadn't had a hit in awhile, or relative unknowns like Macauley Caulkin (HOME ALONE) or Julia Roberts (PRETTY WOMAN. Kevin Costner, who directed and starred in DANCES WITH WOLVES, is the exception here; barring that year's earlier flop REVENGE, he had been on a roll since 1987's THE UNTOUCHABLES. Yet the film which ended up racking up money, critical acclaim, and awards was a three-hour epic about Native Americans, that needed subtitles, and was thought so risky Costner threw his salary into the budget midway through filming. This all served to prove once again William Goldman's famous saying about Hollywood ("Nobody knows anything"), and another less famous dictum of his; that the studio knows the film, or the story of the film, is the star, but don't believe it. That much was evident when the studios merely tried to turn Costner, Moore, and Caulkin et al into stars later in the decade.
DANCES WITH WOLVES also helped introduced the dominant theme of the 90's; the chasm between tastes. In this corner, we had DANCES, which had, despite its heavy subject matter (the mistreatment of Native Americans), an uplifting message that left you feeling good. In the other corner, we had GOODFELLAS, Martin Scorsese's latest mob picture, that wowed critics with its unflinching look at a gangster's rise and fall, but turned even more people off with its violence and profanity. Obviously, this is a simplistic reading of the situation (plenty of critics liked both films, and while not in the same numbers, audiences also flocked to GOODFELLAS), but undeniably, people were asking whose side you were on, especially during the Oscars, where DANCES bested GOODFELLAS.
Speaking of GOODFELLAS, it was one of many gangster films released that year, which was emblematic of another trend of the 90's; the prevalence of trends. Several gangster films were released this year, among them THE KRAYS, KING OF NEW YORK, STATE OF GRACE, MILLERS CROSSING (the best of them), the spoof THE FRESHMAN, and the last chapter of perhaps the best gangster saga until TV's The Sopranos, THE GODFATHER PART III. What distinguished this trend from others is all of these films, whatever their flaws, were serious attempts to make serious films within this genre (except, of course, THE FRESHMAN, which kidded THE GODFATHER), and not just an attempt to cash in.
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