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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