Celluloid Heroes

I’m a little busy bringing down the network tonight, Bill.

Good Night, and Good Luck didn’t tell me much I didn’t know about the showdown between Edward R. Murrow and Joseph McCarthy, but then I considered myself reasonably informed on the events in question. The real issue is whether those ten and twenty years younger than my forty will learn anything about why the current state of network television news is so pitiful and how far it has fallen.

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I don’t know about you, but I intend on writing a strongly worded letter to the White Star Line about all of this.

It’s hard to say what was crazier: spending $200 million on a period love story with a downer ending or the backlash that started a few nano-seconds after the film cleaned up at the Academy Awards. Make no mistake, L.A. Confidential was the superior picture that got robbed of the Best Picture statue, but snubbing a superior, less commericial film has become sort of an Oscar tradition in recent years.

Just because Confidential was the better movie doesn’t mean Titanic sucked, not by a long shot. James Cameron’s epic no more deserves the constant elitist sneering and sniping it has received any more than it deserved the Best Picture award.

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Johnny, you’re not lost. Mother’s here.

Vertigo is probably the archetype for the later Hitchcock films through the mid-60s. The cool, aloof blonde at the center of the story is as dangerous as she is alluring. It is ironically Hitchcock’s most romantic film while being primarily concerned with self-destructive obsession. I don’t think any film more accurately summed up the director’s cynical attitude toward male-female relationships. Hitchcock did not believe in happily-ever-after, at least not as this stage of his career.

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This looks bad for you, Manny.

Almost every Alfred Hitchcock film has something that makes it stand out from the rest of his work. In the case of The Wrong Man, it’s the simple fact that the director has elected to tackle a true story. A movie like Rope was inspired by an actual murder but doesn’t claim to tell the story of Leopold and Loeb. While Hitchcock’s assertion in his opening monologue that it’s completely true, “every word of it,” is a bit of a stretch, the film does conform to the basic facts of the real case.

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A kiss can be even deadlier if you mean it.

Following the huge success of Tim Burton’s Batman, a sequel was inevitable. It’s also clear that Burton was allowed a lot more creative leeway in directing Batman Returns than he had on the first film. The 1989 film had scattered touches of the director’s off-center worldview, but the 1992 sequel was set in a world that was Burton-esque from wall to wall.

To try to top Jack Nicholson’s balls-to-the-wall portrayal of the Joker, Returns gives us three, count ‘em, three villains for our movie-going bucks. The Penguin (Danny DeVito), Catwoman (Michelle Pfeiffer) and Max Shreck (Christopher Walken). You would think with this kind of A-List talent on hand, however, that Batman Returns would bat better than .333 in the villain department. Of the three, only Catwoman manages to emerge as a full-blooded character.

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Oh, no. Not again.

Spaceballs marked the beginning of a second stage to Mel Brooks‘ career. After a busy decade in the 1970s, he had been quiet since 1981’s History of the World, Part I. Unlike his early films, where he satirized broad genres or at least the entire life’s work of a single director, this second wind would find him targeting a single film for parody and, in this case, a full decade after the film in question, Star Wars, was current and considered ripe for the spoofing.

The real weakness of this and later Brooks films is the laziness of the humor. Brooks seems to be weakly emulating the style of Abraham/Zucker films that his early work helped to inspire, such as Airplane! The humor is a scattershot collection of set-ups and punch lines that often seems obvious and labored. Jabba the Hutt is now called Pizza the Hutt. Har har. Yoda is now Yogurt. Stop it, you’re killing me. It’s painful that the man behind Blazing Saddles is resorting to gags that seem more appropriate to CRACKED magazine.

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This the final part of a three-part commentary on the U.S. movie rating system. Part I was PG-13 Is The Spawn of Satan. Part II was Mature Adults Need Not Apply.

Do It By The Numbers

The single biggest flaw in our current movie rating system is that shoehorns vastly different levels of content into the same rating. The R rating can cover everything from the gentle Lost in Translation, with one brief scene in a strip club to a Friday the 13th movie in which a half-dozen nude women get decapitated or meet some other graphically depicted and gruesome fate.

The MPAA has tried to help recently by publishing a brief summary of their reasons for applying a rating, but these are often ambiguous at best. What exactly is a “Sexual Situation”? How much violence is “Strong” violence?

So what do I propose? Nothing less than taking G, PG, PG-13, R and NC-17 and tossing them on a bonfire. We can do better. (more…)

Can somebody tell me what kind of a world we live in, where a man dressed up as a bat gets all of my press? This town needs an enema!

In the late 1980s, Batman was enjoying quite a renaissance, mostly on the strength of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One, along with Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke which rescued the character from the campy 1960s television show and returned him to the dark, gritty streets from which he came. When it was announced that Warner Brothers was producing a motion picture version, the comic’s legions of fans could scarcely contain themselves. The film attracted A-List talent, most notably Jack Nicholson as the Joker and was Warner’s big film of 1989.

What the fans got, however, was a bit of a mixed bag. (more…)

Best thing for him, really. His therapy was going nowhere.

Silence of the Lambs was a rule breaker from the start. Contrary to convention, its primary relationship is between its diminutive female heroine and an urbane serial killer. It cleaned up at the Academy Awards despite being essentially a highbrow horror film that was released in mid-February, approximately eight months before the start of “Oscar season.” Moreover, Anthony Hopkins won Best Actor despite being on screen for about 16 minutes.

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Are you classified as human?

Negative, I am a meat popsicle.

The Fifth Element is a big, noisy, goofy piece of cotton candy, and I mean that as compliment. This is not a film that tries to be anything more than what it is and it’s a lot of fun. Director Luc Besson has put his own adolescent daydreams up on the screen and surrounded them with a dense, richly imagined universe.

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