Celluloid Heroes

You speak good American for a Comanch. Somebody teach ya?

John Ford’s The Searchers is a movie in desperate search for an identity. For every aspect that is excellent, two more make you want to cringe. The film seems to have feet in two eras. Its ambivalent attitude toward the stereotypical treatment of Native Americans seems slightly ahead of its time, although Hollywood would do much better later. Balancing against this are characters and storylines that would have seemed dated when Ford and John Wayne were first working together back in the thirties.

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Celluloid Heroes also pauses to remember Patrick McGoohan, star of the great British TV series, The Prisoner. His movie career was long and varied as well, including Ice Station Zebra, Silver Streak and Braveheart.

Celluloid Heroes pauses to remember Ricardo Montalban, who died today at the age of 88. He was, of course, most famous to television viewers for Fantasy Island and extolling the virtues of “Soft Corinthian leather,” but to this moviegoer, he will always be Khan Noonian Singh in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Señor Armando in the Planet of the Apes movies.

I didn’t know we had a pool!

I think I’ve discovered at least one of the secrets of Pixar’s exasperatingly consistent excellence. Many movies are so desperately eager to dazzle us visually, put their technical prowess on display, that they lose sight of anything resembling story. Pixar seems to wade into each project with supreme confidence in their ability to provide a feast for our eyeballs. This self-assuredness allows them to focus on details like story and character, things that turn a mere lightshow into an enchanting narrative and even help it transcend the boundary into art.

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Okay, I’ve been away for a while. Here’s a sampling of the movies I’m seen recently.

10,000 B.C. (2008)

If you are not going to entertain us, you could at least make it educational. A feature-length version of those Geico caveman commercials would have been better than this example of under-evolved, Neanderthal cinema.

Cloverfield (2008)

The Blair Witch Project meets Godzilla. Some idiot keeps his video camera on the whole time while monsters are trying to kill him and destroy New York. Before the munching even starts, however, you will be more annoyed than entertained.

Expelled – No Intelligence Allowed (2008)

Ben Stein lets some creationists cry on his shoulder, and then he blames Darwin for Hitler. In short, this is a rancid slab of dishonest propaganda of which Joseph Goebbels would have earnestly approved.
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