Four essential time-capsule needle drops from Love Story and Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice
So I’m not sure if Nostradamus had this one, but go look around at your cool, hip, and yes, hipster friends. See the leg warmers? Notice the baggy jean comfort? All of that sloppier, messier clothing aesthetic has yawned itself back into the current personal style blip. I hate to tell you, Paige, Delaney, Cassidy, and Reagan—the ’90s are back. It’s not just a Gen Z passing fancy or that 20-30 year cycle where everything marches and/or running man back into the zeitgeist once again. This retro fantasizing from afar goes deep, like a James Jamerson bassline or a KDot/Drake beef. Rooted in the ick, our cultural malaise, nostalgia has finally stuck around. What do you expect when various streamers pan up old and fresh servings of Friends, Seinfeld, South Park, In Living Color, The Cosby Show, The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer every damn night like it’s Wednesday’s comfort food? Yes, we’re living in “meatloaf again” memes times. Along with lots of baggy jeans, grunge fashion cues, and hair scrunchies in those slices of everyday life.
From digital fatigue, the yearning to physically own something—I knew that “it’s in the cloud” wackness wouldn’t hold water forever—to clamoring for authenticity amidst an AI slop monster, ploppin’ and droppin’ on social feeds already clogged with very bad-taste animation to actual crystal-clear type deepfakes. For sure, people want simpler times in a world full of breaking news segments that never allow the regular news to finish its rotation. This “on to the next” needs dilution. Break out the JNCO jeans.
Two media events, both equally hit the small screen, frame this current ’90s-revisited moment in culture: one with sharp curated taste attached to a political family and the other, an SXSW buzzworthy film bought at the festival and featured on Hulu weeks later, massage and tickles our current timelording sweet spot. The Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette mini-series and the film Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice both take place through the ’90s gaze by way of fashion, music, and the gravity of the times. Each creation tells a story, one serious and the other more of a midnight movie flick vibe, in said decade. Both were released and existed, curiously, simultaneously in the early spring and crisscrossed in unplanned retro-chic bliss. From the city chic Kangols worn in all the five boroughs of New York City streets to The Cranberries’ Celtic dream-pop alt-rock reverberating around skyscrapers; Both symbols, who separately on their own described that decade from two different worlds, took up combined space in the JFK Jr. love story that meets a somber end.
As for writer-director BenDavid Grabinski’s smash-up of time-traveling, super-violent action-comedy, with “sociopathic chatterbox” Vince Vaughn, the way we like him, playing off James Marsden, Eiza González, and the funny version of Keith David (he got those chops too), Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice is high off Tarantino dialogue and M. Night Shyamalan-type plot twists, while taking place also in New York City during the 90’s.
A strip club scene with music by the funk and folk jam band that came up playing frat houses is a twisted bit of humor that works in this throw-it-all-at-the-wall-and-see-what-gets-gross, funny picture.
So if you don’t mind, let’s step in the time machine:
Talk Talk – “Life’s What You Make It”
Here’s what’s funny, friend. Somehow, the same big-beat anthem from Talk Talk (which, admittedly, was released in the ’80s) popped up in Season 4, Episode 2 of The Bear last summer. Still a brutal slice of advice, still with the dirgey piano lines, booming drum track, and earworm of a guitar squall flapping in the wind that accompanies a young JFK Jr. riding his ten-speed around in the Manhattan streets of Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette. The song still carries that heavy heart and massive message, but here we see a king so desperate to fit in with the common folk that he never has the chance to live his own life. Shakespearean for sure.
En Vogue – “My Lovin’ (You’re Never Gonna Get It)”
There used to be a time that looped section of James Brown’s “The Big Payback” at the top of En Vogue’s call to action would come blaring out of bars and clubs from the Lower East Side in Manhattan to The Mission in San Francisco, with a troupe, a clique, club-hopping girl gangs, and squad posses singing those lyrics till the 3 a.m. cabs showed up. Annoying and yet cute all at once, right?
Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette takes the weekend howl-at-the-moon and uses it in the first scene of the second episode, when JFK Jr. is smitten with a new blonde woman who doesn’t care who the hell he is. So he bombards her office with bouquets of red flowers, and she’s low-key, not impressed, while the signature “Never gonna get it” hook and “woo woo woo” ad-libs play on. Player.
Dave Matthews Band – “Ants Marching”
With characters named “Dumb Ass Tony,” BenDavid Grabinski’s Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice has jokes upon jokes; smokes; flies with rapid-fire dialogue; and smashed-together genre-flips. By the time we get to the after-after party, we’re presented with two things that should not be or work together. The frat boy banger, popular 1995 rock jammer, and signature anthem by the Dave Matthews Band, “Ants Marching,” is a showcase moment in a strip club.
Uh-huh. It gets weirder. In the voice famed for narrating so many Ken Burns documentaries, we get to hear the majestic Keith David proclaim, “It’s raining titties up in here.” Such a messed up beautiful moment.
The Chemical Brothers – “Block Rockin’ Beats”
So it was already featured in Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, a 2003 venture in good clean American fun, and yes, The Chemical Brothers were pioneers at bringing the big beat genre to the forefront of pop culture. But to be used in one of the shootout scenes, where a love nest gets shot up, a person’s full collection of bowling balls on the wall gets decimated, and the iconic intro starts after we witness Dolph Lundgren take a fatal bullet through his cranium. Yeah. We’re “back with another one of those black rockin’ beats,” minus the ’90s rave crop top featuring fruits, hearts, or flowers.
