Race is as good as any place to start. Though Ron Shelton's basketball movie WHITE MEN CAN'T JUMP showed blacks and whites, while wary of each other, working together and trusting each other, that peace soon became a distant memory. Spike Lee took on his biggest film yet with his biopic MALCOLM X, about the controversial civil rights leader and Muslim preacher. Along with the film, Lee also dealt with criticism from both sides: black writers complained about his view of Malcolm being too radical or not radical enough, while white writers continued to paint him as a black racist (an Esquire cover said, in effect, that Lee hated all white people), or were none too happy when Lee said he preferred African-American writers to interview him and write about the film, and that African-American schoolkids should skip school to see the movie. ZEBRAHEAD, LOVE FIELD, and MISSISSIPPI MASALA both explored again the thorny notion of interracial romance, and the crime drama ONE FALSE MOVE not only had that, but threw in a rivalry between black and white cops for good measure. And while UNFORGIVEN wasn't specifically about race, it did feature what co-star Gene Hackman would call a "Rodney King moment," where his sheriff character beats a gunman (Morgan Freeman) to death. With all of this, Eddie Murphy's star vehicles, BOOMERANG and THE DISTINGUISHED GENTLEMAN, where race played a factor in neither, seemed particularly silly and out of place.
But race was only part of the unrest. One of the major trends of the year was Hollywood movies telling us we can't trust anybody. In THE HAND THAT ROCKS THE CRADLE, it was "Don't trust the nanny." In SINGLE WHITE FEMALE, it was "Don't trust the roommate (cause she may be a lesbian)." In POISON IVY, it was "Don't trust the friend." Most egregious of all was BASIC INSTINCT, which said, "Don't trust women or gays," though it was so stupid anyway the movie should never have been allowed to make the flap it did. Just to show these films weren't entirely reactionary, UNLAWFUL ENTRY said, "Don't trust a cop," while BAD LIEUTENANT explored the many ways that particular cop was bad.
