Celluloid Heroes

Nobody ever lies about being lonely.

In lesser hands, this movie would have been one long soap opera, but this adaptation of James Jones’ rather bawdy novel manages to wring real human drama out of its characters instead. The real miracle is that the filmmakers managed to tame the rather explicit novel enough to appease the censors and still stay true to the spirit of the story. If all you remember or know about this movie is Burt Lancaster’s famous clinch on the beach with Deborah Kerr, then you owe yourself a viewing of this movie, which has a lot more to offer.

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I do suffer love indeed, for I love thee against my will.

Between the mud-stained medieval warfare of Henry V and the emotional operatics of Hamlet, Kenneth Branagh, dipped his toe in one of Shakespeare’s lightest and airiest comedies and produced one of the most accessible and genuinely delightful versions of the Bard’s plays to reach the big screen. Its plot, boiled down to its essentials, will probably seem familiar to fans of modern romantic comedies, proving that the genre is one of oldest, and most durable, in English literature.

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It’s the karmic credit plan. Buy now, pay forever.

After measuring himself against no less than Laurence Olivier with his modernized adaptation of Henry V and comparing favorably, Kenneth Branagh took aim at no less a figure than Alfred Hitchcock with his next film. As entertaining and stylish as Dead Again is, Branagh seems to be on much surer ground when tackling the Bard of Avon than he does with the Master of Suspense. Visually and thematically, this movie almost feels like vintage Hitchcock but, story-wise, it’s a little bit on the thin side.

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Gentlemen in England now abed shall think themselves acursed they were not here, and hold their manhoods cheap.

Just 29 when he made this, Kenneth Branagh fired a shot across the bow of no less a figure than Laurence Olivier, who had, forty-five years earlier, also directed and starred in his own adaptation of William Shakespeare’s play. Olivier’s version, made in wartime, was intended as a patriotic rallying cry for a weary nation. Branagh’s grittier, more ambiguous version is no less accomplished, although it could stand to be slightly better paced.

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If I told him about that other ten rolls of film, he’d want to use it.

Not long before this movie came out, I spent a couple of weeks in London and, among other things, took in a production of The Two Gentlemen of Verona at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre at Bankside. And unlike my wimpy travelling companions, who splurged for box seats, I experienced the play in true groundling fashion, huddled against the stage in a rain storm. Okay, I don’t think the groundlings of Shakespeare’s day covered themselves in plastic bags, but they would have if they’d had them.

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The design is perfect. The only flaw is that we have to rely on you to fly it.

I didn’t think it was possible to do a bad imitation of Michael Bay without making it a deliberate parody, but this remake of the 1965 Jimmy Stewart classic manages to ape parts of Bay’s signature look while actually making Armageddon look like Citizen Kane in comparison.

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That is precisely the reaction I would have expected from a man of your obvious limitations.

Back when I was a kid, this movie used to play on the Saturday afternoon movie about every third week and, being a boy with a jones for all things aviation, I ate it up. Of course, back then I simply got off on the idea of turning a crashed airplane into a new smaller airplane. As I got older, I came to appreciate the movie for what it was: a deeply insightful drama about men under crisis, couched in the format of an action adventure.

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If Marty dies, I wanna hear that everything’s okay, until I say, “Marty is dead.”

This film would make an interesting companion to Lost in La Mancha. Both films deal in essence with the wheels coming off of film production. While Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote died a quick death from sudden blunt force trauma, Francis Ford Coppola’s troubled production of Apocalypse Now seems to suffer the slow death of a thousand cuts. Originally budgeted at $13 million with a shooting schedule of sixteen weeks, it took more than a year and cost more than twice as much. The story of how this production went so wrong yet resulted in a film regarded as an enduring masterpiece is almost more interesting than the movie’s actual story.

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I know that tone. I’m just not used to hearing it from someone with . . . hair.

It’s been a good couple of years for restarting movie franchises. 2005 gave us Batman Begins and 2006 begat Casino Royale. It also gave us Superman Returns, so no trend is bulletproof. However, it did continue in 2007 with a fourth installment in the Die Hard series, which was easily the most consistently entertaining of the sequels. The original is, of course, still miles ahead, even from this one, but that’s to be expected.

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You mean to tell me that I’m caught up in all this shit because some white cop threw some white asshole’s brother off a roof?

It’s almost axiomatic that the third iteration of a movie franchise is when the sucking starts to begin, assuming that the first sequel didn’t already bring the suck to the table. The good news is that the third Die Hard movie, with John McTiernan back at the helm, manages to avoid this “curse of the third movie.” The bad news is that it doesn’t miss the mark by all that much. This is a Die Hard movie done mostly by the numbers and it’s only because of the sheer professionalism of the enterprise that they bring it off at all.

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