Celluloid Heroes

I do suffer love indeed, for I love thee against my will.

Between the mud-stained medieval warfare of Henry V and the emotional operatics of Hamlet, Kenneth Branagh, dipped his toe in one of Shakespeare’s lightest and airiest comedies and produced one of the most accessible and genuinely delightful versions of the Bard’s plays to reach the big screen. Its plot, boiled down to its essentials, will probably seem familiar to fans of modern romantic comedies, proving that the genre is one of oldest, and most durable, in English literature.

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You gonna do somethin’ or are you just gonna stand there and bleed?

Tombstone was the first shot fired in a double-barreled blast of Wyatt Earp movies in 1993 and 1994. While Lawrence Kasdan and Kevin Costner’s Wyatt Earp was too long, plodding and ponderous, George Pan Cosmato’s entry in the O.K. Corral sweepstakes was violent and operatic, a noisy revenge tale told at a fever pitch. It was also the better movie, even if its fidelity to the facts of Earp’s life was less than letter perfect. Movie audiences have never been that picky about historical accuracy in their westerns. Young Guns did all right and it was hardly a scholarly work on the life of Billy the Kid.

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Those fellows, those boys in blue, they never quite seem the enemy.

Eighty-seven years after they founded this country with the institution of slavery still intact, the country celebrated the Fourth of July in the bloodiest way possible in any effort to resolve that question. The Turner Network’s film of the decisive Battle of Gettysburg is a rigorously faithful adaption of Michael Shaara’s novel The Killer Angels. Perhaps they were a bit too faithful. This movie occasionally suffers from a little of what I call “The Longest Day Syndrome,” which is the tendency for characters to pontificate on the importance of the events in the film as if they were reading from, well, the pages of Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels.

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It’s not easy being a cast-iron bitch. It takes discipline, years of training… A lot of people don’t appreciate that.

James Cameron’s deep sea science fiction tale is one of those rare instances of a director revisiting a finished work and genuinely improving the film. The 1989 theatrical release was marred by an abrupt, confusing ending that was the product of Cameron removing almost an entire storyline to bring the film down to a more commercial 146 minute running time. This drastic surgery earned it some lukewarm reviews when it first hit theaters.

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Unlike some Robin Hoods, I can speak with an English accent.

Following not so hard on the heels of Spaceballs, Robin Hood: Men in Tights marks the second entry in the latter stage of Mel Brooks’ directing career. While not lacking in its share of entertainment value, it definitely lacks the subversive zing found in most of the earlier Brooks films like Blazing Saddles or even History of the World, Part I.

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See mommy picking the big lock? Someday, when you’re a big girl, she’ll teach you how to pick locks. Of course, she may still be picking this one.

I wanted to spin a New Orleans-based movie for Fat Tuesday, and this was the only Big Easy film in my collection.

Undercover Blues is a lightweight, inconsequential comedy that succeeds completely on the charisma of its stars and a thoroughly fearless comedic performance by a fast-rising actor. The plot doesn’t make a whole lot of sense and rests on the flimsiest of MacGuffins, but by the end you’re laughing hard enough not to care.

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In this courtroom, Mr. Miller, justice is blind to matters of race, creed, color, religion, and sexual orientation.

With all due respect, your honor, we don’t live in this courtroom, do we?

It’s difficult now to even imagine a time, a little more than a decade ago, when Philadelphia was a daring, breakthrough film. In structure and style, this movie is a wholly conventional courtroom drama. In 1993, its frank treatment of homosexuality and AIDS was culturally groundbreaking. That’s probably the true genius stroke of this film, taking an edgy, uncomfortable subject and couching it in a familiar setting.

I have to confess that I didn’t see Philadelphia until this year, largely because at the time the movie was released, my oldest brother had less than a year to live and the subject struck a little too close to home for me. Finally seeing it, a decade removed from the real life events, I could appreciate the movie for what it was without dwelling on the subject matter.

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This list… is an absolute good. The list is life. All around its margins lies the gulf.

I first saw Schindler’s List in the theater a few months into its initial run and just days before its sweep at the Oscars. When it was over, I witnessed something I’d not seen much in years of movie going. As the credits rolled and the lights came up, the audience filed out in an almost reverent silence, like mourners leaving a state funeral. Clearly, the film had the same impact on everyone else in the theater that it had on me.

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Your fugitive’s name is Dr. Richard Kimble. Go get him.

When Hollywood announces that it’s going to rape the collective childhood memories of the baby boomer generation and desecrate another television classic for the big screen, the results usually resemble what comes out of the southbound end of a northbound horse. There are rare exceptions, like The Addams Family, which take on a new life of their own when translated to the movies, but having that level of talent on board is pretty rare for such an enterprise. Speaking of enterprises, the Star Trek films are a different kind of exception, being more of a resurrection using the original cast than an actual adaptation.

Hollywood often likes to say they are “re-imagining” these TV shows, which is a laugh. Between the TV adapations, the endless sequels and remakes, “imagine” is a dirty word in that town. For them to re-imagine anything is not only an execise in futile absurdity, but also a violation of the laws of physics.

Thus, if you had told people ahead of time that the 1993 film version of The Fugitive would not only be nominated for Best Picture but that one of its actors would actually take home a statuette, you would have been strapped to a bed, forcibly medicated and not allowed to use sharp objects. In that context, the artistic success of this movie makes raising Lazurus seem like a Vegas sideshow act.

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Hammond: All major theme parks have had delays. When they opened Disneyland in 1956, nothing worked, nothing.

Malcolm: But John, if the Pirates of the Caribbean breaks down, the pirates don’t eat the tourists.

With computer generated special effects in movies about as common as dirt these days, it’s hard to imagine that it’s only been a little over a decade since CGI was the latest novelty. After early pioneering work in James Cameron’s The Abyss and Terminator 2, Jurassic Park was the first film to use computers as a major component of its special effects and to realistically simulate living creatures.

What’s sad to report is that after more than a decade, even with the massive improvements in computer power since 1993, there have been only a handful of movies to use CGI as effectively as Jurassic Park did. Almost anyone with a modicum of talent, a computer and a few thousand dollars in software to produce film quality CGI effects. However, the ability to create life-like critters like Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs requires an eye for movement, form and mass that takes more than the latest software to develop. I think because the effects technicians behind Jurassic Park knew they were breaking new ground in technology, they were rigorously careful that their creations did not look fake.

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