Celluloid Heroes

I’m fixin’ to do something dumber than hell, but I’m going anyways.

Ten years ago, movies like this didn’t win Best Picture. They lost to safe, happy movies like Forrest Gump and Shakespeare in Love. By their usual standards, the Academy voters would have gone with Michael Clayton, the safe and respectable choice. In the last couple of years, however, the Academy has been on a serious indie kick, and the Coen Brothers’ dark character study is about as indie as mainstream movies get. Was the best film of 2007? Perhaps, perhaps not. At least this makes up for Fargo losing out to The English Patient.

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The truth, as always, will be far stranger.

While he was not a filmmaker or an actor, Arthur C. Clarke’s contribution to film was immeasurable for his role in the making of a single film, that being Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. His sequel, 2010, was also made into a film by Peter Hyams, but it was that 1968 masterpiece that showed the world how science fiction could be taken seriously by a serious filmmaker and wasn’t just the province of pulpy juvenilia.

All your life you thought you were better than everyone else. Now you think you’re the worst of all!

Perhaps the saddest line in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Oscar-sweeping epic, comes early when the 9-year-old Emperor Pu Yi (Tijger Tsou) naively tells his brother that an emperor can do anything he wants. The bitter irony is that this is only true so long as the emperor does not want to do anything that matters to the people of China. He spends his childhood as a prisoner of his court’s need to have an emperor, in order to justify their own position.

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Whatever the merits of his various films, you have to admire Ang Lee’s ability not to be pigeonholed as a filmmaker. There aren’t many mainstream filmmakers with as varied a résumé, including comic book movies (Hulk), martial arts (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), gloomy family dramas (The Ice Storm) and genre-bending love stories (Brokeback Mountain). Thus it’s probably no surprise that he seems perfectly comfortable handling this Chinese-language character study masquerading as a spy thriller.

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First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him back safely to the earth. – John F. Kennedy

The Apollo missions to the moon were a big part of my childhood. One of my earliest memories involves the launch of Apollo 12 when I was four. Among my more prized possessions is a big hardcover book entitled “Apollo Expeditions to the Moon,” the official NASA history of the program. Naturally, I have movies like The Right Stuff and Apollo 13, plus HBO’s From the Earth to the Moon, in my DVD collection. You wouldn’t think that there was much that this British documentary could tell me about the subject, but you would be wrong. By focusing on the human experience of the twelve men who actually walked on the surface of another world, In the Shadow of the Moon has something genuinely fresh to say about the greatest adventure of the twentieth century.

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If we die, it will be not be for gold, but for glory.

The high-tech motion capture technique that director Robert Zemeckis uses here has improved considerably since 2004’s The Polar Express, but not enough to recommend that he use it again. True, the creepy thousand-yard stares have been cut down to about a hundred-and-seventy-five yards, but when it comes to inserting lifelike characters into fantastical environments, there is more effective technique called using actors, that worked much better in little film called 300.

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Fuck the itinerary.

Wes Anderson films are not set in the same world in which you and I live. If they were, every member of The Royal Tanenbaums would have been strangled by someone close to them. Even if the three brothers travelling by the Darjeeling Limited do not try our patience to the same degree, it is still hard to imagine them occupying the same physical universe as the rest of us. That is either a testament to the writer/director’s imagination or a damning statement about his grip on reality. For the moment, I will give Anderson the benefit of the doubt and endorse the former view.

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Folks sometimes take me for a nincompoop on account of the shabby first impression I make.

If one had no other reference with regards to the American West, they might gather from this movie that Jesse James’ notoriety came from his ability to talk people to death. Well, most of the jaw-jackin’ in this movie comes from the titular coward, but there is no shortage of talk and a relative dearth of the gunplay that one expects from a typical horse opera.

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The victory of Blu-ray over HD DVD means that it is now safe (well, safer) to whip out the credit card and plunk it down on a player. However, is it a good time to buy or are you better off waiting? The answer to this question is, as usual, “it depends.”

In this case, the factors are how much you’re willing to spend, your current home theater setup, and what you demand from your movie viewing experience.

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