Celluloid Heroes

I suppose he had a private greatness, but he kept it to himself.

Citizen Kane begins with an audacious touch that suits the outsized egos of both its creator and its subject. The opening title bills the film as a “Mercury Production by Orson Welles.” 1941 was more than a decade before François Truffaut began to advocate the “auteur theory,” the notion of the director as the primary “author” of a film, but it clearly conformed to (and, in part, inspired) Truffaut’s ideas. Orson Welles’ hand is on every frame of this film, along with the revolutionary touch of his cinematographer, Gregg Toland.

Kane is a clean break with the Hollywood conventions of the time in terms of both structure and style. This is truly modern film in the way we currently understand the term. (more…)

Day six of my own little Robert Wise Film Festival

There’s a fire, sir

The Andromeda Strain is the greatest science fiction film ever made. I know that is very sweeping statement, so I’ll qualify it by adding that The Andromeda Strain is one of the few films made that genuinely deserve the label of “science fiction,” stories in which speculative science is at the core of the plot.

2001: A Space Odyssey is probably a better film, but it really only qualifies as science fiction if you consider metaphysics to be a science. Most all other films we normally classify as science fiction, or SF, are really just fantasy, action or horror stories set in a futuristic setting.

(more…)

A fleet boat of the Navy, with most of her fighting capability intact, and you’d take her back to Pearl! I don’t believe it!

Day five of my own little Robert Wise Film Festival

Run Silent Run Deep is a crackerjack sub picture that gets a lot of the specific details of life on a WWII U.S. fleet submarine right while the general events of the plot are pure Hollywood. The dialog and procedures aboard the submarine are spot on, thanks to generous cooperation from the U.S. Navy.

(more…)

Day four of my own little Robert Wise Film Festival

It’s life, Captain, but not life as we know it.

The most common complaint about the more recent Next Generation Star Trek movies is that they seemed more like run-of-the-mill TV episodes shot on a big-screen budget. While a valid criticism, this is most literally true of this first cinematic outing for Gene Roddenberry’s then-cult television hit.

The plot for Star Trek: The Motion Picture borrows liberally from the original series episode called “The Changeling,” about a space probe named Nomad that comes back, vastly enhanced by some alien race and programmed with a low tolerance point for human imperfection. At the time of its release, some wag retitled the film, “Where Nomad Has Gone Before.”

The similarity to an existing story is only one weakness. (more…)

Whatever walked there, walked alone.

Day three of my own little Robert Wise Film Festival

Somewhere along the way, Hollywood forgot how to tell a ghost story. It happened without much fanfare, so I can’t say when, but certainly the success of Halloween had something to do with it. That isn’t to begrudge John Carpenter his success, but it set the pattern for the modern horror film that has since calcified into rote repetition. Any form of psychological terror has been jettisoned in favor of a geek show spectacle of masked super-killers leaping out of the shadows to disembowel horny teenagers.

The emergence of the PG-13 horror film recent years, much be-moaned by the gore-hounds, has restored some of my hope that the traditional ghost story might make a comeback. However, except for The Others, The Sixth Sense and possibly The Ring, there hasn’t been much to cheer about in that regard.

The Haunting is a faithful adaptation of the classic Shirley Jackson novel, The Haunting of Hill House. Aside from a couple of name changes, it remains true to the source in story, theme and tone.

(more…)

This does not mean giving up any freedom, except the freedom to act irresponsibly.

Day two of my own little Robert Wise Film Festival

The Day the Earth Stood Still is a film that has, in some ways, outlived its reputation. It is certainly a cut above other films from “flying saucer” sub-genre of science fiction. An intelligent script, Robert Wise’s capable direction and a better than average cast all combine to make this a high-quality production. The film’s only real weakness is that its message of “mankind had better learn to get along or else”, which was definitely bold for a film made during the anti-Communist witch hunts of the early 1950s, now seems like rather juvenile wish-fulfillment. The idea of advanced aliens coming down to solve our problems for us was an early staple of science fiction but is now a best-forgotten cliché.

(more…)

Back home little boys don’t have war councils.

Day One of my own little Robert Wise Film Festival

It was just a coincidence that I had West Side Story in my DVD player the day that director Robert Wise passed away, but as long as I did, I thought it would be a good time to go through his films and include him in this diary. In the next few days, I’ll do The Day The Earth Stood Still, The Haunting, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Run Silent Run Deep, The Sand Pebbles, The Hindenburg, Citizen Kane and an update to my earlier review of The Andromeda Strain. A new DVD of The Sound of Music is coming out soon, so I will wait until then to post my thoughts about that one.

On with the review:

While I’m anything but a scholar on film musicals, it was instructive for me to watch West Side Story right after viewing Singin’ in the Rain earlier in the week. This wasn’t a conscious decision on my part. I use a computer program to track my DVD collection and it has the ability to spit out randomly picked titles that I haven’t watched recently. So, purely by coincidence, I watched the two most famous musicals in American movie history back to back (except for a few episodes of Lost in between).

(more…)

Robert Wise passed away today. He was the versatile director of a wide variety of classic films across several genres, including musicals (West Side Story and The Sound of Music), drama (The Sand Pebbles, Run Silent Run Deep and The Hindenburg), science fiction (The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Andromeda Strain and Star Trek: The Motion Picture) and supernatural horror (The Haunting). He was also the editor of Citizen Kane.

A large number of these films are already in my personal collection and most will be before long.

Bob, you will be missed.

She can’t act, she can’t sing, she can’t dance. A triple threat.

It would be unfair to review Singin’ in the Rain as if it were a normal movie with conventional parts and pieces like a story and character development. The plot of this movie is just a threadbare skeleton on which to hang some of the best musical numbers committed to film and, by itself, would seem thin as the basis of a 22-minute sitcom. You don’t even have to follow the plot in order to enjoy the musical interludes, either, since they have very little to do with each other. Virtually none of the songs were written for the project, but were existing tunes simply incorporated, very loosely, into the narrative.

(more…)

You’re U.S. Government property. You’re a malfunctioning $30 million weapon. You’re a total goddamn catastrophe, and by God, if it kills me, you’re going to tell me how this happened.

Who’d have believed that Matt Damon, of all people, could provide a credible substitute for James Bond? However, with the hallowed Bond franchise in the midst of lean creative times, Damon is tautly believable as a CIA assassin with no memory of who he is and no idea why people are trying to kill him. Unlike Pierce Brosnan’s recent outings as the world famous super-spy, the writers do not let Damon down.

(more…)

We must have boat. Even now may be too late. This is your island, I make your responsibility you help us get boat quickly, otherwise there is World War III, and everybody is blaming you!

Those of us who grew up during the Cold War and remember it as a time of very real suspicion and fear probably look fondly upon this lightweight but not unsophisticated farce. It’s message that “Russian are people, too” probably seems a little simplistic to those too young to remember the times in which it takes place, but in its day, the concept was sufficiently radical to make an impact in the box office. It was, perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the most popular American films behind the Iron Curtain.

(more…)

We live in the trenches out there. We fight. We try not to be killed, but sometimes we are. That’s all.

All Quiet on the Western Front is timeless in spite of the dated style typical of early talkies. At the time (1930), the acting profession was still adjusting to film, using actors schooled in the techniques of live theater. Screenwriting was in its infancy, too, and many of the conventions are obviously adapted straight from the stage.

(more…)