Celluloid Heroes

You speak good American for a Comanch. Somebody teach ya?

John Ford’s The Searchers is a movie in desperate search for an identity. For every aspect that is excellent, two more make you want to cringe. The film seems to have feet in two eras. Its ambivalent attitude toward the stereotypical treatment of Native Americans seems slightly ahead of its time, although Hollywood would do much better later. Balancing against this are characters and storylines that would have seemed dated when Ford and John Wayne were first working together back in the thirties.

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Celluloid Heroes also pauses to remember Patrick McGoohan, star of the great British TV series, The Prisoner. His movie career was long and varied as well, including Ice Station Zebra, Silver Streak and Braveheart.

Celluloid Heroes pauses to remember Ricardo Montalban, who died today at the age of 88. He was, of course, most famous to television viewers for Fantasy Island and extolling the virtues of “Soft Corinthian leather,” but to this moviegoer, he will always be Khan Noonian Singh in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Señor Armando in the Planet of the Apes movies.

I didn’t know we had a pool!

I think I’ve discovered at least one of the secrets of Pixar’s exasperatingly consistent excellence. Many movies are so desperately eager to dazzle us visually, put their technical prowess on display, that they lose sight of anything resembling story. Pixar seems to wade into each project with supreme confidence in their ability to provide a feast for our eyeballs. This self-assuredness allows them to focus on details like story and character, things that turn a mere lightshow into an enchanting narrative and even help it transcend the boundary into art.

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Okay, I’ve been away for a while. Here’s a sampling of the movies I’m seen recently.

10,000 B.C. (2008)

If you are not going to entertain us, you could at least make it educational. A feature-length version of those Geico caveman commercials would have been better than this example of under-evolved, Neanderthal cinema.

Cloverfield (2008)

The Blair Witch Project meets Godzilla. Some idiot keeps his video camera on the whole time while monsters are trying to kill him and destroy New York. Before the munching even starts, however, you will be more annoyed than entertained.

Expelled – No Intelligence Allowed (2008)

Ben Stein lets some creationists cry on his shoulder, and then he blames Darwin for Hitler. In short, this is a rancid slab of dishonest propaganda of which Joseph Goebbels would have earnestly approved.
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Do I look like a guy with a plan?

Comic book movies are all grow’d up and, boy, are they gloomy. Christopher Nolan’s follow-up to his brilliant Batman Begins goes beyond its predecessor and gives us a rich, multi-layered story with one of the more original takes on the comic book villain I can remember. With the creative success of this movie, we can officially write off the Tim Burton Batmans as an unfortunate detour (and the Joel Schumacher films as a large pothole in that detour).

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Toshiba, the chief backer of HD DVD, the loser in the high-def disc format wars, has announced what it calls a “reverse class-action” suit against every household that failed purchase an HD DVD player since the format launched in 2006. The lawsuit charges that, by failing to support HD DVD, their non-customers “handed the format war to Blu-ray on a silver platter and deprived future customer of their right to make a choice.”

Toshiba CEO Tadashi Okamura stated that the suit would target households with a high-defination television and which have a household income of $120,000 per year or higher. “Our lawyers felt that we had cut prices deep enough to sue everybody, but we didn’t want to seem greedy.” Following the example set the Recording Industry Association of America, Toshiba will be seeking $3,000 from every household in the United States that meets that threshold.

“I have a hard time believing that Toshiba would stoop to this level,” said Sony CEO Howard Stringer. “We knew they were losers but we couldn’t guess that they were such whiny bitches.”

Barry M. Meyer, Chairman and CEO of Warner Entertainment, whose decision to exclusively support Blu-ray tipped the format war in Sony’s favor, issued the following statement. “Everyone seems to think that we went Blu-ray exclusive because we were paid hundreds of millions of dollars by Sony. The truth is that we were just tired of putting up with Toshiba’s shit.”

I’m fixin’ to do something dumber than hell, but I’m going anyways.

Ten years ago, movies like this didn’t win Best Picture. They lost to safe, happy movies like Forrest Gump and Shakespeare in Love. By their usual standards, the Academy voters would have gone with Michael Clayton, the safe and respectable choice. In the last couple of years, however, the Academy has been on a serious indie kick, and the Coen Brothers’ dark character study is about as indie as mainstream movies get. Was the best film of 2007? Perhaps, perhaps not. At least this makes up for Fargo losing out to The English Patient.

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The truth, as always, will be far stranger.

While he was not a filmmaker or an actor, Arthur C. Clarke’s contribution to film was immeasurable for his role in the making of a single film, that being Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. His sequel, 2010, was also made into a film by Peter Hyams, but it was that 1968 masterpiece that showed the world how science fiction could be taken seriously by a serious filmmaker and wasn’t just the province of pulpy juvenilia.

All your life you thought you were better than everyone else. Now you think you’re the worst of all!

Perhaps the saddest line in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Oscar-sweeping epic, comes early when the 9-year-old Emperor Pu Yi (Tijger Tsou) naively tells his brother that an emperor can do anything he wants. The bitter irony is that this is only true so long as the emperor does not want to do anything that matters to the people of China. He spends his childhood as a prisoner of his court’s need to have an emperor, in order to justify their own position.

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Whatever the merits of his various films, you have to admire Ang Lee’s ability not to be pigeonholed as a filmmaker. There aren’t many mainstream filmmakers with as varied a résumé, including comic book movies (Hulk), martial arts (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), gloomy family dramas (The Ice Storm) and genre-bending love stories (Brokeback Mountain). Thus it’s probably no surprise that he seems perfectly comfortable handling this Chinese-language character study masquerading as a spy thriller.

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First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him back safely to the earth. – John F. Kennedy

The Apollo missions to the moon were a big part of my childhood. One of my earliest memories involves the launch of Apollo 12 when I was four. Among my more prized possessions is a big hardcover book entitled “Apollo Expeditions to the Moon,” the official NASA history of the program. Naturally, I have movies like The Right Stuff and Apollo 13, plus HBO’s From the Earth to the Moon, in my DVD collection. You wouldn’t think that there was much that this British documentary could tell me about the subject, but you would be wrong. By focusing on the human experience of the twelve men who actually walked on the surface of another world, In the Shadow of the Moon has something genuinely fresh to say about the greatest adventure of the twentieth century.

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