Celluloid Heroes

If I told him about that other ten rolls of film, he’d want to use it.

Not long before this movie came out, I spent a couple of weeks in London and, among other things, took in a production of The Two Gentlemen of Verona at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre at Bankside. And unlike my wimpy travelling companions, who splurged for box seats, I experienced the play in true groundling fashion, huddled against the stage in a rain storm. Okay, I don’t think the groundlings of Shakespeare’s day covered themselves in plastic bags, but they would have if they’d had them.

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When sorrows come, they come not single spies but in battalions.

One might call this the Spinal Tap adaptation of Shakespeare’s greatest play, because everything about it most definitely goes to eleven. The first film of the unabridged text of Hamlet and the last film shot in seventy millimeter as of today, Kenneth Branagh’s brazenly, foolishly ambitious project will be the shortest four hours you ever spent in front of one movie. A broad cast of both veteran Shakespearean actors and many who you would not expect in this kind of film wring both drama and raw emotion out of words often calcified under the dreary mantle of “literature.”

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I will not sacrifice the Enterprise. We’ve made too many compromises already; too many retreats. They invade our space and we fall back. They assimilate entire worlds and we fall back. Not again. The line must be drawn here! This far, no further! And I will make them pay for what they’ve done.

Star Trek: First Contact holds the distinction of the being the best, by a wide margin, of the “Next Generation” era of Star Trek movies. Not coincidentally, it is the only one of the four that doesn’t feel like a television episode that had been blown up for the big screen and needlessly stretched to two hours.

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I hope there’s a good movie on this flight.

Executive Decision is probably the best film Kurt Russell has made since the original Escape From New York. Of course, only Tequila Sunrise and The Mean Season give it any serious competition. That said, this is largely a standard “Die Hard on a plane” action film that works best if you don’t think too hard. Fortunately, most of its mistakes are technical errors that can be mostly dismissed as “artistic license.”

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