Celluloid Heroes

I feel ancient around these kids. Like I’m on some Children’s Crusade.

Wolfgang Petersen’s obsessively detailed World War II epic remains one of the most influential war movies and certainly continues to set a gold standard for submarine movies. Even the best of the rest, such as Hunt for Red October, run a distant second. If this all sounds like fanboy blather, well, it is, but it’s still hard to overstate the achievements of this film.

Despite the era being a touchy subject for their countrymen, or perhaps because of it, the Germans have always seemed to make the best World War II films, including Stalingrad and the recent Downfall, presenting the most unflinching, apolitical examination of that conflagration. Das Boot certainly fits into that category.

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All ahead for attack, Mr. Ware. Maybe we can rip him open in the middle of a waltz.

Often imitated, this movie practically drew the blueprint for the World War II submarine movie. This lean, efficient story of the hunter and the hunted rises above the pack, courtesy of a pair of superb performances in the roles of two crisply drawn antagonists. Some elements of the film seem conspicuously dated, especially the scenes aboard the American destroyer that don’t involve Robert Mitchum hunting the submarine, but when the action is joined, the forced, stilted dialog disappears like it never existed.

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Come on, you apes. You wanna live forever?

This second teaming of writer Ed Neumeier and director Paul Verhoeven is not close to being the equal of their first effort, RoboCop. The attempts at social commentary are just as ham handed and the 1997 film lacks the humor and human dimension of the first. Fans of the original Robert A. Heinlein novel are also advised to steer well clear, as any resemblance between the source material and the final product is strictly accidental beyond the title and the names of a few characters. All this would be forgivable if it produced a good movie. Sadly, forgiveness is impossible in this case.

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I’ll buy that for a dollar!

Although clearly intended as insightful social commentary on the Reagan era, Paul Verhoeven’s first American film works better as straight action with a dose of comedy and a surprising helping of existential turmoil for its titular character. The attempts at social satire were sophomoric even in 1987 but fortunately the director didn’t seem to take that element too seriously, focusing instead on Robocop (Peter Weller) and his struggle to reclaim his submerged humanity.

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Music is supposed to sell.

Dreamgirls took a long time to make the trip from Broadway to the screen, so long that when this film appeared I had all but forgotten that it had first been a play. Big and glossy, this movie is very successful at entertaining you, even if it does seem to play it a little safe at times. The biggest impact of this movie may just be serving notice of arrival of a potent new singing talent.

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You ain’t got but one life. Y’all live it the way you want.

You have to admit, the name alone sounds like a bad Japanese translation of a porn title, and if the premise doesn’t raise your eyebrows, then you probably don’t have eyebrows. Craig Brewer’s follow-up to Hustle and Flow is actually a remarkably warm-hearted tale of personal redemption for two lost souls who meet on a downward spiral for each.

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Someday a real rain’ll come and wash all this scum off the streets.

This story of a lonely man isolated from the millions of people around him could have been told in any city but Martin Scorcese’s movie could only have been made in New York City, and only in the city of the mid-seventies. Travis Bickle is as much a product of that time and place as he is a creation of screenwriter Paul Schrader’s imagination.

The New York City of Taxi Driver is definitely not today’s “Disney-fied” city. This is the pre-Giuliani Big Apple, the domain of pimps and drug dealers. Bickle (Robert DeNiro) cruises the streets in a big, hulking Checker cab, seething with moralistic resentment at the decay, moral and physical, he sees around him.

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When sorrows come, they come not single spies but in battalions.

One might call this the Spinal Tap adaptation of Shakespeare’s greatest play, because everything about it most definitely goes to eleven. The first film of the unabridged text of Hamlet and the last film shot in seventy millimeter as of today, Kenneth Branagh’s brazenly, foolishly ambitious project will be the shortest four hours you ever spent in front of one movie. A broad cast of both veteran Shakespearean actors and many who you would not expect in this kind of film wring both drama and raw emotion out of words often calcified under the dreary mantle of “literature.”

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I’ve never expected metal ships.

Remakes are rarely a good idea. Remakes of classics are even less likely to be a good idea. They rarely improve on the original and more often, to be blunt, they suck. But up with it I’m willing to put if it means that, from time to time, we get a remake like this one, which takes everything that was good about the original and turns it around so it is relevant to the present.

Don Siegel’s 1956 classic took Jack Finney’s original story and fashioned a highly effective tale of Cold War paranoia. The alien pod people, dutifully conformist and seeking to supplant the individualistic Americans, were perfect analogues for communist infiltration, at least to 1950s audiences. Transplanted to the late seventies, we get not a story about infiltration, but of the loss of identity amongst the anonymity of urban life.

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Celluloid Heroes Radio is back on the air. Episode 2 has just been posted. Check it out.