Celluloid Heroes

Speaking of your parents, were they alive, how do you think they’d feel? Proud? Or concerned that your attitude shows, at best, a pathological need for attention, at worst, psychotic death wish.

The Harry Potter films have been, on the whole, getting progressively better with each installment. The first step was ditching the more commercially-minded American director Chris Columbus in favor of two filmmakers whose work you would not normally associate with these fantastic elements. For this fourth chapter, they chose British director Mike Newell, probably best known for the violent mob drama Donnie Brasco.

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I don’t want your money. I want your bookie’s fuckin’ money.

I liked this movie almost every time that Tom Cruise made it back in the eighties. While there are some superficial differences between Two for the Money and movies like Cocktail and The Color of Money, which defined the formula that defined the “Tom Cruise” movie during the eighties, the similarities outweigh them by a ton. You have Matthew McConaughey in the Tom Cruise role as the preternaturally talented newcomer and Al Pacino in the Tom Skerritt/Paul Newman role as the often world-weary mentor. Rene Russo fills out the field as the experienced older woman who will come between the two men, in the same mold as Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio in The Color of Money. Pacino also seems to be channeling a little bit John Milton from The Devil’s Advocate.

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Those who are tardy do not get fruit cup.

The films of Alfred Hitchcock were such a genre unto themselves that it was probably inevitable that Mel Brooks would have a swing at them and, while Brooks does connect with the ball, this film is anything but a home run. More like a dribbler back to the pitcher.

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Remember the famous Russian proverb: “The hungrier you get, the tastier the meal.” On the other hand, the French have a proverb: merde!

As the least well-known of Mel Brooks’s early films, The Twelve Chairs stands well apart from the others. It’s not a spoof of other films nor is it a balls-to-the-wall farce like The Producers. While it has its slapstick elements, it also has a kind of sweetness and elements of character drama not normally found in Brooks’s filmography.

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I’m here trying to squeeze a dollar out of a dime, and I ain’t even got a cent man.

I’m either too old, too white or just too dumb to get it, but I’m never been able to wrap my brain around the use of the word “pimp” as a synonym for making something stylish in a flashy way. How did our culture take a word derived from the criminal exploitation of women and turn it into something that’s elevated to some sort of exalted pop status?

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One night driving a Mercedes, and you’re already an asshole.

Modern film noir isn’t the easiest style to successfully bring off, at least not without appearing overly cute or self-conscious about it. This blood-soaked mix of dark humor and double cross manages to navigate that minefield without making the audience look at the watches until the end credits role. The last film to so adroitly combine noir elements, ironic humor and a byzantine plot was Wild Things and The Ice Harvest is good deal less trashy and more sophisticated than that potboiler.

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I believe God is a sadist, but probably doesn’t even know it.

The scale and depth of savagery that typified the Eastern Front of World War II made the Anglo-American experience on the Western Front seem like a summer tea-party. I don’t know if any film could capture the entirety of the experience and do it justice. Sam Peckinpah’s only war movie instead attempts to portray the hardened fatalism of the veteran German soldiers after the tide of war had irrevocably turned against them.

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It’s good to be the king.

Apparently, Mel Brooks had run out of movie genres that warranted spoofing in their own movie, so he threw together this occasionally successful hodge-podge of historical epics. This movie probably would have worked better if Brooks had found a few more historical periods to include.

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You wear black ’cause you can’t find anything else to wear, you found your sound ’cause you can’t play no better, and you just tried to kiss me ’cause it just happened? You should try taking credit for something every once in a while.

During the last Oscar ceremony, Jon Stewart cheekily referred to Walk the Line as “Ray with white people.” Like all successful humor, the joke has an element of truth to it. There are significant parallels between the two films and the lives of the men at the center of their stories.

Both men were portrayed as genre-bending pioneers of music, although Ray emphasizes this point far more. Both men are shaped by the death of a brother during their childhood and struggled with addictions after achieving their fame. And, oddly enough, both were involved with their film biographies at the time of their death. I think if I were a music legend, I’d stay far away from any biopics about me. Statistically, it sounds rather unhealthy.

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The future of cold is infinite. The future of heat is the future of cold. The bookstores are infinite and so are never full except in September…

John Madden’s adaptation of David Auburn’s stage play examines the situation of a young woman (Gwyneth Paltrow) living under two long shadows cast by her recently deceased father (Anthony Hopkins). Robert, the father, was a unparalleled math genius and Catherine, the daughter seems paralyzed by the pressure to follow in his footsteps. Robert was also crippled by severe schizophrenia that virtually ended his teaching career and Catherine fears the genetic legacy of her father’s mental illness.

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