There's the year's message in a nutshell: Real life had a resonance — even if an unwelcome one — that entertainment reached for and often missed. The denizens of tell-all talk shows mattered more to daytime-TV viewers than the fictional characters of the soaps. Hugh Grant's bust became a litmus test for male-female relations; his movie, Nine Months, was vapid piffle. Topless clubs and cross-dressing went mainstream—and became subjects of films that nobody saw.

Maybe we're simply marking time until the millennium. No one knows what the future holds either, other than that it will involve the Internet, Steven Spielberg and Bill Gates hope to own it, Congress wants to control it, and it'll probably star Brad Pitt. In the meantime, we had a year without a zeitgeist—or at least one we were willing to confront.

We'll have at least one more chance. Last week Simpson prosecutor Christopher Darden signed a deal for a film version of the trial with Steve Tisch, producer of Forrest Gump—a movie, you may recall, that tidily depicted the turmoil of the last 30 years as the events surrounding a pleasant dunce. Tisch is reportedly considering Denzel Washington, Andre Braugher, and Laurence Fishburne for the lead role. At best, such a film's insights could offer a sense of resolution that many people felt cheated out of the first time around. At worst, it'll be the movie they wanted all along.

--Ty Burr

Originally posted Dec 29, 1995 Published in issue #307-308 Dec 29, 1995 Order article reprints
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