Sometimes in my dreams it's the 1990s all over again, and my feelings about it are always ambivalent. If the dream is good, I get to dance to Nirvana with a club logo stamped on my wrist. If it's bad, I have to take the train to get to the nearest Starbucks and I don't even have a cellphone, just a pager. Prehistoric stuff.
Still, my guess is that many adults out there have a soft spot for the '90s, and director Edward Zwick ("The Last Samurai") is a prime example. Witness his latest, "Love & Other Drugs," for evidence — Zwick is mightily enamoured with clunky desktop computers, power executives, pagers, business suits and briefcases bulging with A4 documents. Those were the days — when people drank themselves silly after work, didn't really give a hoot about exercise and felt free to smoke. They were also blissfully unaware of inconvenient truths about government, social injustice and the environment, and could therefore concentrate on stuff that really mattered — like sex.
The gist of "Love & Other Drugs" is that in the mid to late '90s (when the story takes place), people had tons of real, undiluted sex, and should anyone in their crazy minds call or send an email during that time, they were ignored — as opposed to today, when many couples jump at any excuse to fondle a smartphone.
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