Celluloid Heroes

I’m not going to waste my time arguing with a man who’s lining up to be a hot lunch.

Many of you might not be old enough to recall but Jaws effectively invented the concept of the summer movie as we know it today. Two years before Star Wars, it was the first film to really demonstrate the power of all those teenagers, recently freed from school, to generate an ass-load of money at the box office.

Of course, this was also before the modern marketing machine was fully geared up, so in order for a movie to become a mega-blockbuster, it depended on a lot of word-of-mouth to get people’s butts into the seats. In those days, it still required that the film not suck. Mission accomplished, I’d say.

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Listen, strange women lyin’ in ponds distributin’ swords is no basis for a system of government.

Believe it or not, those potheads who sat around all day back in the seventies, listening to Led Zeppelin IV or Dark Side of the Moon, actually contributed something worthwhile to Western Civilization when members of the bands Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd used some of the profits from their albums to help finance a little gem of cinematic anarchy known as Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

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I’m here with my partner and nine other people, see. And we’re dying, man. You know? You’re going to see our brains on the sidewalk, they’re going to spill our guts out. Now are you going to show that on television?

In Sidney Lumet’s gritty heist drama, Al Pacino hadn’t yet become a parody of himself. He’s still a great actor but in some of his recent films, like Heat and The Devil’s Advocate, his acting has taken on a broad, over-the-top quality not found in his earlier work. In Dog Day Afternoon, even standing on the sidewalk, chanting “Attica! Attica!” Pacino never oversells the performance, making Sonny a nuanced and sympathetic character.

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Escape to Witch Mountain is probably the archetype of the Disney live action picture in the 1970s, a featherweight but thoroughly entertaining confection of juvenile wish fulfillment. Ask people in my generation (and a little younger) what their favorite movie was as a little kid and they’re probably as likely as not say this one (My answer would be Le Mans, but I was a weird kid). Escape was a huge hit by the standards of this kind of movie and one of the few Disney movies to inspire a sequel until we were struck with the plague of animated straight-to-video sequels during the 1990s.

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Goebbels: There is no resistance movement, Colonel!

Ritter: That’s reassuring, coming from the Minister of Propoganda.

Day eight of my own little Robert Wise Film Festival

Think of The Hindenburg as kind of like Titanic, except without the romance or an interesting story. Both films deal with fictional portrayals of real life disasters involving famous vessels, one at sea, one in the air, but for Titanic to be as bad as The Hindenburg, Captain Smith would have been shown deliberately steering the ship into the iceberg for reasons that would be left inadequately explored.

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