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Just 29 when he made this, Kenneth Branagh fired a shot across the bow of no less a figure than Laurence Olivier, who had, forty-five years earlier, also directed and starred in his own adaptation of William Shakespeare’s play. Olivier’s version, made in wartime, was intended as a patriotic rallying cry for a weary nation. Branagh’s grittier, more ambiguous version is no less accomplished, although it could stand to be slightly better paced.
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144 years ago this coming week, a Union regiment from Massachusetts led a futile assault on a Confederate bastion near Charleston known as Battery Wagner. As Civil War battles go, it was relatively minor and would normally go unremarked compared to the Battle of Gettysburg and the fall of Vicksburg, which both happened at roughly the same time. What made this action remarkable was the fact that 54th Massachusetts Volunteers was the first regular unit of the Union army to consist entirely of black soldiers, led by a white colonel, the son of prominent Boston abolitionists.
As an account of this event, Glory is reasonably accurate and thoroughly inspiring, built around a core of superb actors giving some of their best performances. It’s portrayal of Civil War combat is technically on par with the later Gettysburg, only more realistic and bloody, fully deserving of the film’s R rating.
Theatrical Cut:
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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.
Four years later, Cameron re-released a 171 minute cut to theaters and then home video. Continue reading
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It’s no accident that the moral center of this movie, a kindly rabbi named Ben (Sam Waterston), is in the process of going blind. Woody Allen’s bleak comedy takes a piercingly cynical look at the notion that punishment for the guilty is any kind of a certainty. In the world of this film, power, privilege and luck have more to do with justice than any kind of moral virtue.
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Films like this one, in which an unconventional teacher inspires his students to be something more than what’s expected of them, are common enough to constitute a minor genre on their own. In addition to Dead Poets Society, we’ve seen Mr. Holland’s Opus, Dangerous Minds and Stand and Deliver. Those are just the ones that I could name off the top of my head.
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In the late 1980s, Batman was enjoying quite a renaissance, mostly on the strength of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One, along with Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke which rescued the character from the campy 1960s television show and returned him to the dark, gritty streets from which he came. When it was announced that Warner Brothers was producing a motion picture version, the comic’s legions of fans could scarcely contain themselves. The film attracted A-List talent, most notably Jack Nicholson as the Joker and was Warner’s big film of 1989.
What the fans got, however, was a bit of a mixed bag. Continue reading