Celluloid Heroes

When you’re talking to them, they seem like perfectly nice boys. To be frank, I’m much more concerned for my safety around Normal Mailer.

Back in the 1990s, there was a unfortunate epidemic of duplicate projects in Hollywood, plaguing us all with competing films about volcanoes, earth-killing asteroids and Wyatt Earp. If back then you would have informed me that the next time this phenomenon surfaced, the subject would be author Truman Capote, I would have driven you to the Betty Ford clinic myself.

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Ever since I was a child, folks have thought they had me pegged, because of the way I am, the way I talk. And they’re always wrong.

Capote is a film that literally hangs on the performance of its star, so it’s a good thing that Philip Seymour Hoffman completely vanishes into the role of author Truman Capote. Without Hoffman’s presence, I’m afraid that this film wouldn’t hold together. It certainly wouldn’t have held my attention.

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First of all, it was a criminal oversight that they left Joseph Stefano, screenwriter of Psycho, off the list of the recently deceased people being honored.

Best Director

File this one under, “It’s about damn time!” but it’s nice to see that Marty Scorcese won for a movie that most people agree was genuinely deserving and it wasn’t like Paul Newman winning a consolation prize for The Color of Money.

Best Actor & Actress

The Queen of England and The Last King of Scotland. Now that was the sound of inevitability.

We don’t sell Tic Tacs, we sell cigarettes. And they’re cool, available, and addictive. The job is almost done for us.

This movie wants to be the Dr. Strangelove of the tobacco wars and I’ll be darned if doesn’t almost do it. Some might say that cigarettes are an even more audacious subject for a comedy than nuclear war, since tobacco takes out more people in a given year then the A-bomb has in the history of the human race. Thank You For Smoking certainly aims for big targets, but they are also easy targets. The film’s position, namely that tobacco companies have behaved with the all the moral fiber of Jeffrey Dahmer’s ne’er-do-well brother, is hardly original nor particularly newsworthy. This acid-etched satire, directed by Ivan Reitman’s son, Jason, scores its points with sharply drawn characters.

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I don’t mind a reasonable amount of trouble.

Plato believed that everything in the world has an “ideal universal form” that represents the perfect example of the imperfect things in the real world. For many, The Maltese Falcon is the Platonic ideal of the hard-boiled detective story. True, it’s not the earliest example of the genre, the original novel already having been adapted twice for the screen in the previous decade, but it still contains classic examples of what we consider the basic elements of that genre of film. Most of would now be tired clichés of detective films were either established or popularized by this classic version of Dashiell Hammet’s novel.

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I never thought this would go the distance.

In the early seventies, producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind successfully translated Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers into a pair of films, shot together as one. Despite being sued by several of the performers demanding payment for two films instead of just one, the Salkinds must have thought it was successful enough to attempt repeating the experiment when they adapted Superman for the big screen later that decade.

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