Celluloid Heroes

Someday a real rain’ll come and wash all this scum off the streets.

This story of a lonely man isolated from the millions of people around him could have been told in any city but Martin Scorcese’s movie could only have been made in New York City, and only in the city of the mid-seventies. Travis Bickle is as much a product of that time and place as he is a creation of screenwriter Paul Schrader’s imagination.

The New York City of Taxi Driver is definitely not today’s “Disney-fied” city. This is the pre-Giuliani Big Apple, the domain of pimps and drug dealers. Bickle (Robert DeNiro) cruises the streets in a big, hulking Checker cab, seething with moralistic resentment at the decay, moral and physical, he sees around him.

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Don’t you know slapstick is dead?

You might call Silent Movie Mel Brooks’ version of Adaptation, since it’s kind of a movie about itself, a silent movie about Mel Brooks making a silent movie. Of course, there aren’t any real parallels between the two films but how often do you get to compare Mel Brooks to Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze?

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We’re about to accuse Haldeman, who only happens to be the second most important man in this country, of conducting a criminal conspiracy from inside the White House. It would be nice if we were right.

Adapting Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s bestseller about their investigation in the Watergate scandal, director Alan J. Pakula, screenwriter William Goldman and Robert Redford accomplished the near impossible. They made a genuinely gripping political thriller out of the day-to-day drudgery of the life of a newspaper reporter. They did it without hyping up the story with a lot of false Hollywood devices or overly glamorizing its lead characters. It is this prosaic sense of everyday reality, this semi-documentary style that gives the film its tension. There is no point where you are comforted by the thought that it couldn’t happen this way. It could and it did. (more…)

The Communist Party’s not gonna see a nickel out of this goddamn show until we go into syndication!

Sometime during the last thirty years, Network has gone from an outrageous, absurdist comedy to almost a documentary. Almost. While some of its points about reality television, media consolidation and news-as-entertainment seem eerily prescient, fortunately not all of it has come true. Dan Rather was not gunned down during his last broadcast and, to the best of my knowledge, the Communist Party never had its own network series. (more…)

Isn’t it touching how a perfect murder has kept our friendship alive all these years.

The last Alfred Hitchcock film, 50 years after the first, showed that the director had not lost his macabre sense of humor. Family Plot may lack the taut, intricate plot of his more famous works but it succeeds well for what it attempts to be, a light comedy-thriller. It’s a fun, unassuming film, especially compared to the R-rated Frenzy and the cold-war machinations of Torn Curtain and Topaz.

My original memories of this film, from viewing it perhaps 20 years ago, told me that this film was styleless, that Hitchcock’s setbound directorial style gave it the ambience of a made-for-TV movie-of-the-week. I was wrong, perhaps due to the fact that my previous experience was with a VHS copy of the film, projected on a large screen in a college lecture hall. That sort of presentation is never going to do a film justice.

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There… is… no… sanctuary.

Picture this: three friends are taking in the 1998 comedy Free Enterprise. We represent about half the audience in the theater. The film, which deals with a pair of lifelong science fiction geeks facing their 30th birthdays, has a dream sequence that begins with a very specific, recognizable throbbing noise. The three friends collapse in hysterical laughter while the other half of the audience sits in confused, stony silence. The difference between the two parties is that the three who are laughing have seen Logan’s Run, probably more than once.

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