Flashback

Movie #7

Date Released: 2.2.90

Date Watched: ?

Reaction:

Well, former hippy slash fugitive Huey Walker’s (Dennis Hopper) prediction that the 90’s were going to make the 60’s look like the 50’s was just dead wrong. But I appreciate the bold prediction. This movie is entertaining enough but, really, it just gets you thinking. The 80’s was still colored by the pain and anguish and dashed hopes of the 60s and 70’s. Scars from Vietnam were not that old. This movie reminds us of that. You may even find yourself counting on your fingers quite a bit. Could Keifer Sutherland’s character really have been alive in the 60’s? Could he actually have been at Woodstock? How old am I, then, if I saw this movie when it came out?

Here’s some time perspective: Vietnam has now been over for around 45 years and World War II had only been over for 25 years when Vietnam was raging. Furthermore, it has been longer, today, since Flashback played in theaters than it was between the start of Vietnam and the release of the movie.  That war was a long long time ago and it makes this movie seem ancient. It will feel even more ancient for anyone born after 1990.

It will be interesting to see if there are other movies of this type as I roll through 90’s comedies. This is a ‘decade-turning-point’, millennial type movie, possibly trying to put the 60’s finally away and move on to the promise of a new decade that also wraps up a millennium. Currently, I would lump this movie in with Metropolitan. A nostalgic goodbye to an era that has died or dying, both with the recognition that there is a falseness to those times and to the nostalgia of those times.  In a way, it is supposed to have an optimistic ending (again, siting Walker’s quote) but then (spoiler alert) the former rebel, revolutionary, hippy, and fugitive from the feds hops into a limousine, wearing a stud earring in one ear and an expensive 90’s style suit and drives away, up a steep San Francisco street. 

Perhaps Flashback was fairly prescient.

Publishing Notes: