Celluloid Heroes

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.

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Please, they’re dead. It’s a little late to be neurotic.

So, the story is: One day Adam and Barbara Maitland died and things sort of went downhill from there. The end result is a movie showcasing director Tim Burton at the top of his game. It also helped launch the careers of both Alec Baldwin and Winona Ryder (and introducing me to Winona Ryder is more than enough for me to forgive them for introducing me to Alec Baldwin).

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Take off your clothes.

Philip Kaufman’s adaptation of Milan Kudera’s novel is a long, erotic rumination on the nature of freedom, personal, political and sexual. It follows an informal triangle involving a womanizing surgeon named Tomas (Daniel Day Lewis), his shy, sensitive wife, Tereza (Juliette Binoche), and his free-spirited lover, Sabina (Lena Olin), through the Prague Spring of 1968, the brutal Soviet crackdown and its aftermath.

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Help me find her!

Lady In White in an Old-Fashioned Ghost Story in every sense of the word, probably more effective told around a camp fire than it is as film, but it’s no slouch on the screen, either. Writer, director, producer and composer Frank LaLoggia obviously saw this film as a labor of love and, despite occasionally spoon-feeding the audience a little too much, he has crafted a warmly affectionate look at small town life in 1962. In fact, the portrait of Willowpoint Falls is so vivid that the ghost story almost seems like an intrusion. On the other hand, I guess that’s what ghosts do, dramatically speaking.

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