Celluloid Heroes

Still think it’s a dream?

For what it tries to be, about the only thing I can find wrong with The Final Countdown is the title. There really is no countdown involved and, even if there were, there would be nothing particularly final about it. We shouldn’t let that hamper our enjoyment about what has to be the best movie ever made about a time-traveling aircraft carrier.

This is one of those movies that would be nothing without its cast, as it depends upon actors with a certain level of gravitas that you need to sell a profoundly silly premise and this film has scored a jackpot in that department.

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Klytus, I’m bored.

This is the kind of movie that Ed Wood would have made if he’d ever had the budget. It has everything: bad writing, bad acting, bad special effects and bad music. Is it cheesy? There’s enough cheese on screen to keep every restaurant in France supplied with sauce for a year. Is it campy? It goes beyond camp. This is an entire Boy Scout Jamboree. Is it corny? Like Iowa, baby.

Okay, Mr. Smart Alecky Movie Reviewer Guy, stop beating around the bush. Did you actually like it?

Um… yeah.

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By now we’d come to look at all replacements as dead men who temporarily had the use of the arms and legs.

The Big Red One, Samuel Fuller’s fictionalized retelling of his own experiences as a member of the 1st Infantry Division in World War II, is a particularly effective grunts-eye view of the war, despite its somewhat meager budget. It follows an unnamed Sergeant (Lee Marvin) and four soldiers of his “first squad” who manage to survive the war with him. They join him as inexperienced “wet-noses” before the invasion of North Africa and follow him to the very end of the war, when they liberate a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia.

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It’s 106 miles to Chicago, we’ve got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it’s dark and we’re wearing sunglasses.

Regardless of whether or not I like the movie, The Blues Brothers has something serious to answer for. This is probably the film that convinced movie producers that sketch characters from Saturday Night Live could be successfully translated into movies. Therefore “Joliet” Jake and Elwood have to shoulder part of the blame for travesties like A Night at the Roxbury and It’s Pat.

The problem is that the Blues Brothers weren’t sketch characters. They didn’t have a catch phrase and their only “schtick” was a genuine respect for the music that they covered. This gave screenwriters Dan Aykroyd and John Landis the freedom to craft an actual story around the characters. If the story is a little too slight to support two hours and thirteen minutes of running time, that doesn’t matter too much. Like their Blues Brothers appearances on SNL, this movie is mostly about the music.

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Striker, listen, and you listen close: flying a plane is no different than riding a bicycle, just a lot harder to put baseball cards in the spokes.

When Airplane! appeared on the scene, people acted as if they had never seen anything like it before, but of course they had. What the Zucker Brothers and Jim Abrahams created was a two-hour cinematic vaudeville act. Set-up, punchline. Set-up, punchline. Bah-dum boom. All that was missing was a drummer in every theater to deliver the rimshots.

This is a good thing, too. Movies hadn’t been this funny since the Marx Brothers were making Duck Soup, and haven’t really been this funny since. The only thing to come close to this level of shameless wall-to-wall laughs was Jim Abraham’s and the Zucker Brothers’ short-lived TV classic, Police Squad, which inspired the Naked Gun movies.

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