Celluloid Heroes

Once you get married you only hang out with other married people. Why? ‘Cause no single person could stand to be around you.

I’ll be the first to admit that Chris Rock is not my cup of tea when it comes to stand up comics. He’s smart and he is funny, but there is something in his delivery and demeanor that I find off-putting for some reason. Needless to say, a new Chris Rock movie is not high on my list of “must see” pictures. Imagine my surprise when I found both his acting and directing to be among the best parts of this intelligent but deeply flawed comedy.

Despite able and attractive actors in the lead roles, I Think I Love My Wife is hampered by a sitcom story that’s simply too thin to support a feature-length film. After establishing its players and their situation, it spends the middle parts of the film running them in circles until the end.

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Patton will lead the assault. I would prefer Montgomery, but even Eisenhower isn’t that stupid.

This movie serves as both an unofficial sequel and thematic bookend to The Longest Day. It has an undeserved reputation for being overlong, ponderous and dull. It’s none of those things but I can understand how it could appear that way to people expecting a more conventional war movie.

A Bridge Too Far details, at great length and in exacting detail, the Allied debacle known as Operation Market Garden, an over-ambitious plan by General Sir Bernard Law Montgomery to end World War II by Christmas, 1944, by kicking down the undefended back door of Germany. The main problem with the battle plan was that it depended entirely on Murphy’s Law being repealed. For it to work, nothing could go wrong and, of course, everything did. That focus on the human price of hubris in war, of even the good guys succumbing to “victory disease,” makes this an atypical war movie at the time, more similar in theme to war movies made twenty years later.

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