Celluloid Heroes

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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