My minimum price for taking a stranded lady to a telephone is 400 dollars.
Back in the eighties, there were a lot of films (and television shows) that tried to cash in on the success of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Who would have thought that this breezy trifle, written years before Raiders, would come closer to capturing the spirit of the original film than Spielberg’s sequel of the very same year?
The Cheech and Chong for the new millennium? Maybe, but I suspect this pair of stoners will lose their freshness in a hurry. What is here is amusing enough but beyond the colorblind casting, there’s nothing groundbreaking going on here. Damn, now I’m hungry.
Jason Statham actually gets to do some real acting in this nifty, fact-based caper movie set in the early seventies. Period music and a generally sexy vibe don’t hurt the entertainment value, either.
Heath Ledger shows real star power in this otherwise uneven mixture of period costumes and contemporary music. Medieval peasants know the words to Queen’s “We Will Rock You.” That about says it all.
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.
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 inexplicably 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.
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.
