Spit’s all that’s holding me together right now, too.
Them! launched what would be Hollywood’s version of the Godzilla movie, expressing our atomic-age fears via giant bugs and insects instead of rubber lizards. This particular sub-genre has been largely forgotten by our collective movie memory, but Them! remains as an example of 1950s sci-fi done with a style and self-confident maturity that the category often lacks.
Now, if you’re on me and you gotta move when I move, how do you expect to keep a marriage?
Poor old Michael Mann. Here he was getting ready to make what was going to be the Lawrence of Arabia/Citizen Kane of cops-and-robbers movies, and he thought he had the legendary Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino working together for the first time. What happens? They pull a switcheroo on him and stick him with the world’s worst Pacino impersonator. (more…)
Man, if this is their idea of Christmas, I gotta be here for New Year’s.
When 1988 began, this guy Bruce Willis was a popular enough TV star, known for his years on Moonlighting, but his two ventures into film were a pair of alleged comedies that had a negligible impact at the box office. At the same time, action movies had been in a creative black hole, full of invulnerable superman battling hordes of commies and terrorists. So, when Die Hard appeared with an unproven star, there weren’t a lot of expectations for its success. It certainly wasn’t expected to reinvent the entire genre. Well, Merry Christmas in freakin’ July, Hollywood.
Now that Dr. King is gone, no one left but Bobby.
Perhaps a better title for this movie would The Martyrdom of Saint Robert. This movie spends most of its two hours genuflecting before the memory of JFK’s little brother. While it’s not hard to believe that Bobby Kennedy was the most interesting person at the Ambassador Hotel on the night of the California primary, this movie would have you believe that the Senator was the only interesting person present that night.
This is a real badge, I’m a real cop, and this is a real fucking gun!
You might not remember it, but this film was Mel Gibson’s “comeback” after his first career meltdown during the mid-eighties. At least that one didn’t wind up offending any ethnic groups. Through the production of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, Gibson had acquired a reputation for surliness, hard drinking and brawling, until he finally walked away from the movies for two years. This 1987 prototype of the buddy cop movie marked not only his return to the film business but the birth of a new Mel Gibson, the funny action star with the Three Stooges fetish.
If confusion about your love life is ruining your day, I think it’s good to go over to your best friend’s house and ruin her day, too.
L.A. Story is a film dedicated to the premise that the city’s reputation as a haven for free-spirited oddballs is actually understated. It also looks under the well-buffed exterior of the so-called “beautiful people” and finds layers of desperation and loneliness below the insecurity we already knew was there. This Los Angeles is a place where a woman’s breasts feel odd if they’re real.
Of course I’m respectable. I’m old. Politicians, public buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.
Take a screenwriting class, any screenwriting class, and I almost guarantee you that, before the first session is over, your teacher will mention Robert Towne‘s script for Chinatown in a tone that grown men usually reserve for talking about their first crush. The screenplay for this film has been held up as an example of near perfection of the screenwriting craft and, if I were more cynical, I might look hard for a reason to find fault with that opinion. I probably wouldn’t find it, though.
