Celluloid Heroes

Dying together’s even more personal than living together.

Lifeboat presented director Alfred Hitchcock with two very specific technical challenges. One was how to create a 90-minute film when your action was confined to a handful of actors aboard one small boat. The other was how to stage his traditional walk-on appearance when it would be very incongruous to have a portly Englishman in a black suit simply stroll by. The second problem was solved very simply but ingeniously. Hitchcock was featured in an advertisement for a weight-loss pill in a newspaper read by one of the characters. The first problem was a matter of planning the film with storyboards, shot by shot, which the director did better than anyone.

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Maybe someday you forget what it’s like to be human and maybe then, it’s okay.

In Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River, a tragedy that shattered childhood innocence reaches out to destroy lives decades later. In some way, one of the main characters is murdered as a twelve-year-old but takes thirty years to die.

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I don’t think you’re an asshole, Royal. I just think you’re kind of a son of a bitch.

The Royal Tenebaums is a masterfully-executed, unconventional little film starring some of our best actors, all at the top of their game, all playing characters I wanted to strangle by the middle of the picture. It’s an odd feeling to so thoroughly admire the craft with which a film was made, while still hoping for a Roland Emmerich-sized catastrophe to obliterate the city in which these characters live.

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PG-13 Is The Spawn of Satan

Well, not quite, but I think the PG-13 rating is like a vortex sucking the film industry toward mediocrity. I’m not sure Hollywood needed any help moving in that direction but the 21-year-old rating has, in my opinion, given it a rude shove down that road.

For those of you too young to remember (or if you were simply too coked up during the 1980s), it’s all Steven Spielberg’s fault. Well, kind of. The PG-13 arouse out of the public furor over the 1984 movies Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, which he directed, and Gremlins, which he produced. The violence level in both films was considered shocking for PG rated films but somehow didn’t cross that R-rated threshold. Something in between was demanded and thus PG-13 was born.

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