Why We Love It

There’s been a lot of shameful Phillip K. Dick adaptations. From John Woo’s comically bad Paycheck to the just plain bad Next, Dick’s prolific work does not always receive the best of treatments. However, Stephen Spielberg delivered one of those best treatments. In the vein of Blade Runner and Total Recall, I have no doubt that Minority Report will be regarded as a classic one day.

Not only is it a perfect action movie, but a near-perfect film in general. From a technical to structural standpoint, very few false notes are hit. The story is consistently moving. Everything about this futuristic world is set up in a tremendously accomplished first act. A thought-provoking, subtle gray area is hit. The pacing never stops, but it also does not rush to get to the action-packed goods.

Like all great science-fiction, Minority Report poses genuine questions. Can an individual change their fate if they know their own destiny, or is there no possible way to stop what’s coming? The million dollar question, of course: Should someone be charged with murder, despite not haven committed murder?

A perfect middle-ground is struck to provide legit arguments for both sides. When it comes to the changing one’s destiny question, there are two polar opposite cases of how that idea is handled in the film. John Anderton (Tom Cruise) knows when the crime is meant to occur, wants to do everything he can to avoid killing Crowe, and yet the murder still occurs. Things do not go down as exactly envisioned, but just how the precogs foresaw, John shoots the man.

On the flip side is Lamar Burgess’s (Max von Sydow) case. Before taking his own life, John warns him about the consequences of the two choices he has, “Shoot me and prove PreCrime works or don’t shoot me and prove that it’s flawed system. Lamar killing John is what the precogs predicted… but that vision does not come to fruition. Unlike John’s scenario, Lamar altered his situation where it mattered: by not committing murder.

The film provides two reasonable point of views on all its questions.

When Colin Farrell enters the picture, he plays the higher-up that one would expect to be the villain. That’s not the case. Danny Witwer is the perfect semi-antagonist to John. He lost an important family member, but unlike John, does not believe in PreCrime.

Witwer is the only detective in the film that has worked on real murder cases. Everyone else, PreCrime supporters in particular, view it as a simple “Let’s go catch the bad guy, with no questions asked!” whereas Witwer sees it as a genuine process, where all angles should be examined and carefully studied. He may be the most cynical character in the film (which is an archetype that Spielberg has used a few times to ask the bigger questions about the ethics of a complex scenario) but he is also the smartest.

What could have been a one-note smarmy federal agent is a fully realized, thematically important, legit threat of a character. By looking at most conventional antagonists, it’s clear when they have no chance of defeating the hero. Farrell, physically and strategically, comes off like he could potentially take John down.

Speaking of Cruise, this may be his best performance. There is a genuine sadness and humility that the superstar brings to John. Cruise doesn’t care if you find this druggy detective charming — he is not someone I would want to hang with on a Saturday night — but that the audience sympathizes with his pain and regret, which we do.

On the outside, he is a basic action hero. On the inside, he is a tortured character from a family drama. This is about a man whose family was ruined, and by the end, he achieves redemption and creates two more families; he saves the precogs and gets another baby in the oven. Going even deeper, John takes the precogs away from a pool, like his son was. Instead of taking a life away as his son’s kidnapper did, he gives it.

Many criticize the happy ending John gets, but it is completely earned. The tortured hero becomes aware of his obliviousness to the moral issues with PreCrime. John considered it to be a simple “1+1 = 2″ process, but he then comes to see it as nothing of the sort.

Moment We Fell in Love

The first act of Minority Report is how you do the world building exposition right. Rather than choosing to use a lazy text-scroll or a goofy voice-over — most likely, and preferably, done by Morgan Freeman — explaining the mechanics of this future, Spielberg shows you.

In the first few minutes, it is astonishing how much is established; what type of guy John is, how the Minority Report works, how PreCrime is viewed in the public eye, and what type of noir future has Spielberg thrown us into.

Final Thoughts

There are people who love Minority Report, but it doesn’t seem to be regarded as one of Spielberg’s best yet. Perhaps audiences saw it as another Tom Cruise action movie, and not the brilliant post 9/11 commentary that it is; losing our rights in favor of protection. Sound familiar?

Thrilling, imaginative, smart, entertaining, slick, full of great performances– how many more hyperbolic adjectives do I need to write?

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Your mission, if you choose to accept it…

During an undercover mission in Prague, IMF agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) witnesses his spy team picked off one by one—including his mentor and friend, Jim Phelps (Jon Voight).

With the blame of sabotage and treason on his head, Hunt goes on the run to clear his name, entrap the real conspirators and deliver the perfect dose of tentpole bravado.

Why We Love It

Whether they’re appropriate viewing for young persons or not, summer blockbusters always get a pass from parental units. They’re traditionally flashy, shallow and simple enough to play to a broad audience—the perfect family experience. Ten year olds and fifty year olds alike can find enjoyment in an alien invasion spectacle or a terrifying disaster pic. That’s what we get in the summer and it’s welcomed.

So when Brian De Palma‘s Mission: Impossible crept into theaters in the summer of 1996, no one was expecting the classic TV show adaptation to rip off its action movie rubber mask and reveal a twisty, murky espionage thriller—including youngster me. But, really, we should have seen it coming: the original Mission: Impossible was a brains-first mystery-of-the-week and De Palma’s history was steeped in Hitchcockian style and storytelling. In the early days of the Internet, few people casually hit up IMDb to find out the big Mission: Impossible movie was from the man who brought us Sisters, Dressed to Kill and Body Double. Whoops.

The revelation made—and continue to makes—Mission: Impossible a breath of fresh air when sifting through the years and years of summer movies. Tom Cruise, De Palma and countless writers (including Steve Zaillian, David Koepp and Robert Towne), poured detail after detail, twist after twist and techno-babbling dialogue after techno-babbling dialogue into M:I to make it move at a mile a minute. The movie keeps us on our toes, pushing a mystery forward that doesn’t always make complete sense, but Cruise’s Ethan Hunt is either so mentally incapacitated or confident in his plans that we always feel on board.

The fact that, with each repeated viewing, I feel the same adrenaline rush I did back when I was a wee little Patches, is a testament to every aspect of the film. Two years later, De Palma would go completely batshit style-crazy with Snake Eyes, abusing zooms, split-focus diopters and crazy camera angles. In Mission: Impossible, the flashiness is a perfect fit, turning the movie into a weird amalgamation of tentpole actioner (let’s not deny the awesomeness of the infamous train/helicopter fight) and ’70s paranoia thriller. In a world where a stick of chewing gum can become an explosive—tech-savvy camera work makes sense.

And say what you will about modern Tom Cruise, but back in ’96 the movie star was at the top of his game. He makes Hunt slick, with a no-bullshit attitude peppered with moments of absolute terror. There’s no one to trust but his own spinning brain and Cruise’s investment into the world makes the whole movie click. There aren’t many people with eyes wild enough to make watching a character type German bible verses into a computer for five minutes interesting. Tom Cruise is one of those people.

Much like an elaborate spy operation, Mission: Impossible feels strikingly calculated, each piece of the puzzle adding to the mystery, the exhilaration and, most importantly, the fun. The so-classic-it’s-parodied sequence in which Hunt and his team sneak into Langley as firemen, slip an analyst laxatives and wire down to an untouchable room is the epitome of everything the movie gets right. Much like Ethan Hunt keeping steady inches above the floor, you’ll break a sweat—but you’ll love doing it too.

Moment We Fell in Love

The first time I saw Mission: Impossible I thought it was a lot of fun…and I needed to see it again. It took a second viewing for me to love it, quickly affirming that love the minute the movie whips out its balls and kills off half its cast. Recognizable faces like Kristen Scott Thomas and Emilio Estevez were enlisted by IMF to reclaim the coveted NOC List, only to see their plan ripped apart by an unknown assailant. Watching Estevez fly face first into a roof of spikes is a shocking moment. Emilioooooo!

The sequence makes a clear statement: you have no idea what’s about to happen. And it’s a lovely, lovely feeling.

Final Thought

You’ll find people who favor the other two films over this original—M:I 2 for John Woo’s bombastic set pieces or J.J Abrams’s M:I 3 complete with amplified team aspects (which, if you ask me, pale in comparison to the glimpses of the IMF team in the original)—but it’s the first movie that continues to resonate as something unique. Yes, it’s a blockbuster, but it’s also cinema, weaving dazzling special effects, Danny Elfman’s un-Elfman-like score, sharp cinematography and a handful of engaging performances by the likes of Cruise, Voight, Emmanuelle Beart, Jean Reno and Ving Rhames, into one satisfying package. Even after watching this movie in my twenties, I still leap off the couch, hands in the shape of a pistol, pretending to be a spy. Wait, pretending? No. I am a spy.

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After the terrorists that gave Doc Brown the plutonium to get the time machine working come after them with big guns, Marty travels back to 1955 where he meets his parents, accidentally stops them from falling in love and must find a way to get them back together before he disappears from existence.

Why We Love It

You know that crazy-haired old coot down the road from you who lives in a barn and survives on a constant diet of Jolt Cola and Pixie Stix? You know that one that everyone is sure has murdered some suburban family and stashed their body parts in various places around the house? Imagine he is a loveable old scientist who wears vintage clothing and says things like “Great Scott!” That’s the type of charming 80s fun we see in the summer runaway hit Back to the Future.

Back in 1985 when Back to the Future came out, all the contemporary references were so trendy. From Marty’s teenage slang of saying “heavy,” which 1955 Doc Brown misinterprets as a future gravity problem, to his clothing styles (I’m sure he had a Swatch in there somewhere), this is as indicative of 80s fads as a show like Square Pegs or a movie like Revenge of the Nerds.

As much as Back to the Future was a champion of its decade, it was a champion of then-30-years-past 1955 and all the pop culture of that time. It was a movie version of That 50s Show, serving up a huge slice of nostalgia to go along with a chocolate shake at the malt shop.

Back to the Future was a love letter to the 50s, and since it just came out recently on Blu-ray, watching it today is also a love letter to the 80s. From the music to the fashion to the simple good-versus-evil storytelling, it makes us think of what we thought was a simpler time (which really wasn’t any simpler than today; we just didn’t pay taxes back then when we were kids).

And yes, there’s that music. As a 50s throwback film, there were great oldies in the soundtrack, including “Mr. Sandman,” “Earth Angel” and “The Ballad of Davy Crockett.” But there were also some quintessential 80s music, including Huey Lewis and the News’ hit theme “The Power of Love.” And all the music nerds of the day have to giggle at Huey Lewis himself declaring that Marty’s band was “just too loud.”

Even beyond the pop music in the soundtrack, there was Alan Silvestri’s brilliant score that made the film as much of an adventure as it was a sci-fi film or comedy. In a decade dominated by John Williams soundtracks, this is one that still sticks in my mind more than anything else.

Time travel stories can be tricky, not just because of the paradox pitfalls in the writing and the fact that by the 80s a lot of the core stories had already been picked over by Star Trek and The Twilight Zone. They’re tricky because it’s hard to retain that hard sci-fi element of the genre and keep the film grounded as a period piece. Back to the Future manages this perfectly, far better than it does with its subsequent sequels that came out a half a decade later.

But in the end, Back to the Future was just damned fun. It was a true escape movie that allowed you to travel back through time and spend a few hours in the shoes of Marty McFly, even if they’re horribly dated (and probably way too small for most of us) now.

Moment We Fell in Love With

As a kid, I was sold on this film the moment Doc Brown’s dog Einstein was thrown one minute into the future in the DeLorean. But the climax of the film is where it brings in that surge of emotions. I’m not talking about Marty and Doc Brown successfully orchestrating the scientifically impossible timing of charging the DeLorean with a lightning strike. I’m talking about the “Earth Angel” moment, when Marty is literally fading out of existence and George McFly gets the balls to stand up to Biff who was about to have his way with Lorainne and her impressive cleavage.

Who would think that a scene featuring the potential rape of the leading lady is not only fully acceptable in a PG movie, but emotionally brushed away seconds later. Ah, the 80s.

Final Thoughts

While I do truly love the Back to the Future sequels (even with the almost unforgivable plot addition of Marty refusing to be called a chicken), the original still holds up as the best of the series. It’s also represents a time in director Robert Zemeckis’s career when he actually made real movies, rather than overblown special effects films or mo-cap CGI presentations. It is essentially 80s, and to my thirteen-year-old eyes watching it at my huge six-screen multiplex in Columbus, Ohio, it was a defining film of my childhood.

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Leonidas organizes 300 of Sparta’s best men to fight off Xerxes’ army, each man wanting the glory of dying in battle to defend their great city. While they’re out getting all hot and sweaty in just tiny pairs of war shorts, Queen Gorgo (Lena Headey) remains in Sparta trying to drum up support of the Spartan council to ready troops for war only to prove just how fierce Spartan women are when she’s threatened, assaulted, and almost killed by Theron (Dominic West), a senator more interested in power than glory. Two stories diverge in the course of Zach Snyder’s 300: one of war and glory and another of corruption and treachery.

Why We Love It

Before we get all nit-picky, 300 isn’t exactly historically accurate. I mean, King Leonidas did lead 300 Spartans to their death at the Battle of Thermpylae. King Xerxes’ massive Persian army did falter a little at the strength of the Spartan men, but defeated them after a three-day battle. Even the Spartan women were as beautiful and as tough as the film suggests. And in my imagination all the soldiers are impossibly sexy and beardy, but who really knows about that part. However, Snyder’s career-making film is based off a graphic novel loosely grounded in the history of a battle so long ago it’s impossible to trust what’s really true. It’s actually the fun kind of history, the melding of fiction and fact, just like Herodotus would like.

Most audiences don’t go to films expecting a great history lesson, rather they want an engaging story from the moment they start to the second the final credits roll. That, my friends is exactly what I end up with every time I watch 300. From the moment adult Leonidas is introduced we know this dark and violent film is going to be impossible to turn off. He cherishes his queen, his son, his beloved Sparta. His loyalty and generous nature make him an easy king to love in return. When he comes back from the rapey Ephors (see-ers) with news that Sparta will fall to the Persians, his men readily line up to battle alongside him. Together they head out, seeking honor and the heads of Persians to add to their shields.

It’s painful to watch such a tragic story, as we know this isn’t going to end well for these men. But, that’s the point. The sense of urgency on screen coupled with the provocative voice of our questionable narrator keep us rooting for the doomed Spartans.

Moment We Fell In Love

In the first ten minutes Leonidas is asked by the Persian messenger to think about his final words carefully, as killing a messenger is a quick way to war. He turns, looks out as his people and his beautiful queen. Upon turning back to the Persian he spits out that the man has insulted his queen, threatened his people and for that he deserves to die. “This is Sparta,” a final blow so simply pointed and built with such thought.

Sparta is not just a city. It is an identity and a way of life to these citizens. They believe in the traditions and expectations their culture holds. Women are almost equal to men, as they birth Spartan men—an interesting form of ancient feminism and something Snyder tries to revisit in all his lady characters. Although they don’t go to battle, the women are just as tough as the men and act as motivators for their greatness. Leonidas has an almost modern appreciation of his queen and that added element makes them not only a powerful couple but also an ideal fantasy.

I’d be remiss to leave out the almost pornographic elements of 300 men walking around angry, naked, and sweaty, as I am a lady of a certain carnal reputation. Snyder is the king of what I like to call, equal opportunity objectification. He didn’t have to put the characters in just their skivvies, but he did. His commitment to nakedness is noticed and appreciated, and lucky for us the film is actually fun AND sexy.

Final Thoughts

300 balances the darkest parts of human nature with high melodrama and wraps it all up in a tasty, fulfilling package. Snyder, taking a page out of Robert Rodriguez’s book, made a film that looks and feels exactly like the graphic novel on which it was based. Even with five years advancement into CGI, the animation and saturation still look stunning, and the story remains just as fun as when it first premiered. Also Gerard Butler and Michael Fassbender have never looked hotter.

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Ever fired your gun in the air and yelled, “Aaaaaaah?”

Former college quarterback Johnny Utah (Keanu Reeves) is a rookie FBI agent in the 98th percentile of his class at Quantico. On his first assignment, he’s sent to L.A. County – bank robbery capital of the world – to bust the notorious Ex-Presidents. This unstoppable gang of thieves has hit 27 banks in three years, working with speed and surgical precision. Pappas (Gary Busey), Utah’s veteran partner, suspects they’re surfers. Obviously, Utah is going to have to learn how to surf so he can go undercover, get the girl, and bring the bad guys to justice. Whoa.

Why We Love It

Ah, Point Break. Why do I always find myself in the minority whenever I vigorously defend this film as a neglected classic?

Yes, the premise is totally silly. Basically, this film suggests that good police work consists of 5 percent forensics, 5 percent deductive reasoning. 50 percent deception, 50 percent dumb luck and 75 percent sheer manliness. “What the hell?” you’re probably thinking, “That adds up to 185 percent!” Damn straight. 185 percent f-ing awesome, my friend.

See, in order to truly love this film as I do, you’re going to have to shut off those obnoxious higher brain functions that set off all kinds of alarms at the mention of anything that sounds improbable. Improbable like, say, FBI Agent Pappas’ convoluted theory explaining why the Ex-Presidents must obviously be surfers. I won’t bore you hear with his convoluted chain of flimsy evidence and hunches. Basically, his theory boils down to this: These guys are simply to cool to be anything but surfers. And solving the case will require Utah to become cooler than he already is. How’s that for a win-win?

As some have pointed out, Point Break would be virtually remade 10 years later as The Fast and The Furious. Although the latter film would prove far more profitable, F&F is an embarrassingly tepid rehash. Its primary value is to demonstrate, by comparison, why Point Break works so well.

First off, you’ve got a rock-solid cast. Patrick Swayze perfectly embodies Bodhi’s “modern savage” with a philosophical streak. Keanu Reeves, with his ripped physique and stoner drawl, could’ve been born with a surfboard under his arm. (For his mom’s sake, let’s hope he actually wasn’t. Ouch.) Gary Busey, let’s face it, is not nearly as convincing as a mentor as Swayze. But as comic relief, he’s unbeatable. Who else could so convincingly portray a middle-aged guy who seems to possess the mind of an ADHD-addled 13-year-old? And let’s not forget Lori Petty. Successfully cast against type as Keanu’s love interest, Tyler, she’s a far cry from the stereotypical Beach Blonde or Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

The other element that pushes Point Break into the realm of aesthetic transcendence is Kathryn Bigelow’s assured direction. Her action sequences have a visceral physicality lacking in the work of so many other lesser filmmakers. Bodies collide, blood sprays, bones crunch. Bigelow doesn’t merely sublimate all that energy into sparkling eye candy. She makes you feel it in your gut. As even Hot Fuzz’s notoriously uptight Sgt. Angel had to admit, Bigelow delivers a no-holds-barred, adrenaline-fueled thrill ride.

Moment We Fell In Love

As a kid, there was one segment on my VHS copy of Point Break that I definitely wore down to a ragged thread. It’s the chase that takes place about an hour into the film, as the Ex-Presidents are fleeing the scene of the Assured Trust Savings and Loan heist with Agents Utah and Pappas in tow.

It’s six minutes of sheer madness. First, you’ve got what amounts to a high-speed, two-car demolition derby, followed by a game of vehicular cat-and-mouse through a mall parking lot. The Ex-Presidents ditch their getaway car, setting it – and a gas station – on fire. Utah catches up to and tackles Bodhi, who’s wearing white gloves, a black suit and Ronald Reagan mask, and they wrestle in the fire. A spectacle of exhilarating hand-held camera work follows as their foot chase tears through backyards and alleys, over fences and through living rooms, kitchens and glass patio doors, before ending in the L.A. River. A fortuitously timed recurring football injury keeps Utah from following Bodhi any further, and his now-conflicted loyalties keep him from opening fire. In frustration, Utah blows his full 9mm wad into the sky and yells, “Aaaaaaah!”

Well, what would you do?

Final Thoughts

It’s hard to believe Point Break is 20 years old this week. In some ways, sure, it’s dated. It definitely seems like one the last gasps of the golden age of ’80s Hollywood action cinema. But it’s no feeble death rattle. Like Bodhi himself, the film represents the last of a proud but doomed breed: Going down hard, going down fighting.

And as long my gonads continue to pump testosterone, Point Break will continue to be one of the summer movies I love.

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Will Speed find the will to defeat some evil corporate schmuck? Since this is intended to be a kid’s movie, yes, you bet he will!

Why We Love It:

Dick Tracy + Sin City + The Matrix + The Wizard of Oz + Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory + Wall Street (yes, that Wall Street) + whatever visually eye-titillating movie you can think of = Speed Racer. This film is totally “cool beans,” and that, while featuring flavors of those movies listed, is its own colorfully bombastic beast.

This movie is reviled by so, so many, and my response to them is to “get that weak shit off my track!” Okay, okay, enough with the great pun jokes. But when it comes to discussing a film like Speed Racer, it’s nearly impossible to write about it without thinking of how to work in many of its hilarious lines; as I’m writing these words right now, I’m looking at its quotes section on IMDB to see which line I can work in next. But that’s not to say there aren’t plenty of zingers to remember after viewing the film. I mean, who could really forget a line like, “Inspector detector suspected foul play”? What type of sick minds write something like that? WHO ACTUALLY SAYS SOMETHING LIKE THAT?!

Only someone in the crazily imaginative world the Wachowskis created with their box office bomb. Just by reading a single piece of the dialogue on paper, one gets a crystal clear sense of what type of universe this is: a cartoon one. I recall, upon the film’s release in ’08, some… well, most — just go look at its abysmal 38% RT score — criticizing the movie for not being “realistic,” and for being “cheesy.” Would someone criticize Schindler’s List for being depressing or for not being funny enough? Speed Racer is not supposed to be realistic. It’s not supposed to be edgy. It’s supposed to be cheesy. It’s supposed to be heightened beyond one’s imagination. And it sure as hell is supposed to appeal to your inner child.

Not in that cheap, fake nostalgic way, either. So many filmmakers only make movies about the films they love, and they always feel more like annoying fanboy letters than their own movies. At least once a year we get a director blatantly tipping his gigantic hat to movies that appeal to both him and the nerds who are definitely going to attend and eat up his nostalgic love letter, but that’s not very interesting filmmaking. It’s nice and well-intentioned, sure, but not very original or engaging.

What the Wachowskis did was original. They don’t try to pull in their nerd audience in by pandering, going, “Look! We like the same movies you nerds did as kids! Love us!” They tried to pull their audience into Speed Racer by appealing to one’s child sensibilities. The directing duo didn’t just make a film for kids, but one for all of us who have a fondness for what fun meant to us when we were eight years old.

Who didn’t love pretending to be in a cartoon? Who didn’t treat their pet like an actual person? And who didn’t fantasize about getting a dream girl who was into the same things that you were? Trixie is the type of gal we all wish we had before we actually knew what we were supposed to do to a woman, and the whole film sticks to that type of endearing innocence.

Speed and Trixie look like they’re supposed to be early 20-somethings, and yet their sex life and boyfriend-girlfriend relationship is total non grata. We don’t even see Speed kiss her until the final minutes of the film, and that moment is treated with such importance that it’s almost as if he never tried to make a move before. Even with their relationship being so clean and childlike, Trixie is constantly over at his house, for no clear reason.

There’s a scene that involves a late night discussion between Pops and Speed, and the whole family is eavesdropping in on the conversation… including Trixie. What’s this girl doing over at 2 a.m.? Does she live there? Wouldn’t Speed’s parents find that odd? In the real world, yes, of course they would.

But this isn’t the real world.

Even on a basic logistical and relationship level, this is a cartoon through and through. Anyone over 50 who didn’t grow up with anime or Saturday morning cartoons juiced up with all types of colors and energy won’t find an easy time getting into this universe. This is the type of movie that deserves some sort of age limit.

One objective quality that those old bastards who vomited all over the movie must acknowledge: Speed Racer goes for a heart of gold, and the Wachowskis love these good-hearted people. Speed is an optimistic, family loving, morally sound kid without a mean (or horny) bone in his body. When it comes to Mom and Pop, one couldn’t ask for more adoring and supportive parents. And, as already stated, Trixie couldn’t be a cooler girlfriend, despite the fact that she doesn’t seem to give any.

The only character the Wachowskis don’t seem to be in love with is Spritle. He is – to bring another cartoon into the discussion – the Roger Rabbit of the movie. Spritle annoys everyone, and soon enough, he begins to drive you mad as well. Early on I started to hope that there would be a scene involving Speed taking this kid down to the track, where he would be gruesomely run over in an “accident.” Sadly, that scene didn’t make it into the final cut…

And that must have been the only scene not to make it into the final cut. The fact that this is a 135-minute long kid’s movie is both baffling and awesome at the same time. It’s a bit bloated, but considering the technical triumph of seemingly creating about 1,000 new colors, who cares?

What one should care about, though? The great kiddy violence.

Speed Racer connects to the imagination and mindset of a kid, especially the violent side. In this story, when a kid talks trash about your brother, you punch him in the face. When an annoying British girl calls your man a “retard”, you punch her in the face. These are all actions that a kid would take, or ones that a kid would at least want to. This isn’t a male wish fulfillment film, but a boy wish fulfillment film.

Moments We Fell In Love With:

The David Mamet dialogue converted for children:

“Okay, no more Mr. Nice Guy!”

“It doesn’t matter if racing never changes. What matters is if we let racing change us!”

“You poor, naïve chump. I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that load of sickening schmaltz!”

“Terrible what passes for a ninja these days.”

“Pancakes are love.”

“It’s Racer X, The Harbinger of Boom!”

“All that matters is power, and the unassailable might of money!”

Final Thoughts:

Speed Racer runs longer than it should and clearly has moments that should’ve been chopped out early on in the editing room, but even its overlong running time isn’t a big enough problem to ruin the excitement of seeing a terrifically ass-kicking performance by Matthew Fox, Emile Hirsch’s nice “gee-whiz” kid charms, and Christina Ricci giving off smiles powerful enough to make you want to dump your girlfriend without a second’s hesitation.

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Chief of Police, Martin Brody, Roy Scheider, is more than a little concerned when he sees the remains of the shark’s first known victim washed ashore after the first attack. But the Mayor, Murray Hamilton, doesn’t want to hear it. Too much money will be lost from tourism if the public is made aware of the man eater hunting off of Amity’s coast. A marine biologist, Richard Dreyfuss hears about the Great White and comes to warn the town of the danger they face. He’s also more than a little curious to see the giant man-eater that’s on the loose.

It’s a danger that grows worse as the body count rises, even as the Mayor keeps his head buried firmly in the sand. He finally realizes the enormity of the problem and now has to figure out what to do about it. Enter, Quint, Robert Shaw, not merely a fisherman, but a hunter of man eaters of the deep, this grizzled Great White hunter wants to take on the beast. The shark is of course vanquished and we end with a Casablanca “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship moment” as Brody and Hooper paddle back to shore on the remnants of Quint’s boat, the Orca.

Why We Love It

The shark is rarely seen. In this day and age of CGI, Anthony Serkis might have been hired to slither around a sound stage, been motion captured and turned into a Great White shark on the prowl. But back in the day, when all Spielberg had was a mechanical shark named Bruce, he had to keep us guessing. He had to offer only glimpses of the shark with its own theme music which pretty much anyone can still identify. Of course Spielberg might have handled it the same way in the CGI era, but Jaws is a great example of less is more, way more. People disappear, swallowed up, devoured by the beast and of course hysteria ensues.

But it’s what we don’t see that scares us far more than what we do see. Our imaginations are powerful and Jaws makes us use them. There’s just enough horror element to keep an audience on edge, but it comes as shocks, not streams. The shocks come from a creature that is a natural predator of the deep, coming close to shore to feed on swimmers. It’s not an Alien or a killer robot from the future. It’s something we can all recognize from books and television.

We all know when the dog chases the stick into the water what’s about to happen. We don’t know exactly when. The image of a chewed, deflated, blood stained raft washing up on shore as a mother frantically looks for her son is unforgettable. The child who begged to go in the water one more time isn’t coming back.

Scheider, Shaw, and Dreyfuss are all well cast. Shaw’s grizzled Quint, confident he’ll get the shark, Dreyfuss’ Matt Hooper, the guy who thinks he can kill the shark from the “safety” of a shark cage, Scheider, the police chief trying to keep his cool when the sleepy island he’s responsible for is hit with far more than just a wave of beachgoers.

Moment We Fell In Love

In its opening scene Jaws puts the audience in the water with a very vulnerable swimmer who could never imagine her horrible fate. In a scene directly from Peter Benchley’s novel we are witness to the terrifying death of a young woman tossed around the calm sea like a puppet until finally she’s pulled under the water. All while her male companion is passed out on the beach oblivious to her screams.

Something is amiss in Amity and very soon everyone will be afraid to go into the water, though not soon enough to prevent more shark attacks. The tension rises. The shark often only seen as a fin in the water glides effortlessly picking off victim after victim. When two young boys pretend to be the shark using a wooden fin, swimmers panic, while in the peaceful bay the real shark is preparing to take another victim.

I wonder how audiences in 2011 would react to Jaws on the big screen. Movies have become far more explicit in the horrible visuals they throw at audiences. Explicit gore is the norm. But, the judicious use of gore in Jaws is far more effective, in my opinion. We feel Hooper’s terror when the head of one of the shark’s victims pops out at us and him. It’s a jump worthy moment because it’s so sparingly used. When the horror hits, it hits hard.

Final Thoughts

Many films have come at us with Aliens, Predators, guys with hockey masks and chain saws. Most try to terrify us by showing the terrible fate of the victims in every slice and dice detail. But Spielberg’s restraint when he made Jaws is one of the things that make it one of the movies I love. He knew how to scare an audience with a rarely seen Great White shark stand in named Bruce. In the summer of 1975, Jaws kept a lot of people out of the water.

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That pilot, Cliff, becomes that gold helmeted flying phenom. This comic book adaptation is full of Nazis, a vain and villainous actor, and an ugly as hell goon.

What more could you ask for?

Why We Love It

As a young and adorable child, I had one go-to VHS film. That beloved piece of spectacle was none other than Joe Johnston‘s The Rocketeer, a lesser Indiana Jones film. But even second-rate Indiana Jones is still awesomeness to behold, so I ate up every second of Johnston’s pulpy adventure.

To this day, I still eat it up… to a degree. Like most loved films from our youth, the film doesn’t hold up completely when you’re viewing it with a few more active brain cells. The Rocketeer is not the epic I recalled the superhero film as being. Despite the structure’s glaring problems, the tone’s pure sense of fun and earnestness makes this a blockbuster that’s easy to embrace. This ain’t a Willow or Neverending Story situation; films you can only really enjoy if you’re blinded by nostalgia when you’re older than ten.

And the film does have one sweet looking title character, and I’m referring to the suit, of course.

When star Bill Campbell is in the iconic suit, it’s gangbusters. When he’s not in his costume and is asked to rely on his “charisma,” it’s not gangbusters in the way intended. This is the anti-Iron Man. Favreau’s film is more fun with Stark outside of the suit. If Downey displays some level of restraint, something that seems difficult for him now, he oozes with charm. Campbell doesn’t contain half the larger-than-life quality that Downey or many other likable heroes portray. Cliff works great as a non-hero, not a naturally cool one. He’s not that daring, doesn’t treat his dashing gal Jenny (played by a gorgeous Jennifer Connelly) too well, and doesn’t throw too many punches either.

Timothy Dalton truly steps up to be that naturally cool character, and he’s so damn smarmy in the best way possible. Dalton has an uncanny talent for dickery, and Johnston lets him off the leash here. Dalton plays a prissy Nazi actor, and it’s a performance that is just cartoonish and chilling enough.

His vanity makes him menacing, not so much his plan or actions. The stakes are almost nonexistent. There is the evil Nazi plan to have all their soldiers becoming “rocket men,” but that’s a backseat scheme that is given little attention. The only legit-seeming threat is Cliff losing his Jenny, who pretty much loathes him for most of the film. She always looks as if she’s on the verge of dumping the hero or throwing him off a roof, and he gives her just reasons to do so. Their relationship is hilarious.

Alan Arkin‘s Peevy is the only who can stand Cliff for more than five-minutes. He’s the bumbling father figure with the witty quips, the sound advice, and is by far the most self-aware. He gets how ludicrous and dangerous certain situations are. Peevy points out what the audience is usually thinking. Arkin, being his usual Arkin self, gives the film grounding and a nice sense of humor.

The Rocketeer may be completely campy and unrealistic, but the movie works best when reveling in its own ridiculous nature. The Dick Tracy extra that stands in as the ugly and quiet henchman is pure cartoon magic. Ultimately, that’s the film: a great Saturday morning cartoon.

There’s a nostalgia and appreciation Johnston wears earnestly on his sleeve for those old serials that clearly have inspired so much of his work, and 20 years ago, he made a film that is just as fun as those influences. Johnston’s love for good old-fashioned and non-cynical adventure overshadows The Rocketeer‘s lesser qualities, and even those lesser qualities make for a lovable type of goofiness.

Moments We Fell In Love With

Every one of Timothy Dalton’s hilarious lines:

“It wasn’t lies, Jenny. It was acting!” [Cue maniacal laughter]

“A what? Spy? Saboteur? Fascist? All of the above!”

[While throwing down with The Rocketeer] “I do my own stunts!”

“If I go to the Feds, I’m taking you down with me! Who are they going to believe? A petty crook, or the No. 3 box-office star in America?”

“If she moves, kill her!” [A nice tip of the hat to The Wild Bunch]

Also when James Horner‘s excellent score is in full force.

Final Thoughts

It’s a bit of Indiana Jones, a bit of Bond, and a lot of fantastic camp. While I spent almost more time ragging on the film’s ironic issues than discussing what’s truly great about the film, The Rocketeer hits more home runs than it misses. Like the solid Hidalgo and the Boba Fett creator’s terrific October Sky, there’s an earnestness to this 1991 superhero film that easily wins me over and slaps a smile on my face.

With Johnston getting to play with a bigger scope along with having a genuinely charismatic leading man, Captain America: First Avenger should represent a new and improved version of The Rocketeer, a.k.a. a fantastic summer blockbuster.

P.S. God help you if you’re more than five years old and actually like The Neverending Story.

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“I don’t believe in magic, a lot of superstitious hocus pocus. I’m going after a find of incredible historical significance and you’re talking about the Boogieman! Besides, you know what a cautious fellow I am.”

Anybody who has watched any amount of the History Channel knows that Hitler was obsessed with the occult. What this movie presupposes is that he probably lost the war because he diverted too many of his resources towards the doomed goal of acquiring the Ark of the Covenant, which in case you didn’t know, is the chest that contains the original stone tablets on which the ten commandments were written.

According to religious hocus-pocus, any army that marches while carrying the Ark would be unstoppable on the battlefield, as they would have the endorsement of the good Lord Himself. So what does the U.S. government do when faced with the task of racing the Third Reich to unstoppable power and endless influence? They hire an archeology professor from Marshall College, one of the most rough and tumble adventurers in the world, to go out and find it first. They get Indiana Jones. The only problem with the plan is that the key to finding the Ark is in the possession of one of his ex-girlfriends, and she’s kind of a crazy drunk.

Why We Love It

Raiders of the Lost Ark is the world that existed in all of our imaginations when we were five years old. Back when things like quick sand, man-eating piranhas, mummified bodies, and petrified wood were the most important and interesting topics of conversation. Not that they aren’t still. Raiders is the distilled moonshine of all the great things that showed up in the B-Movie serials of the 30s and 40s, boiled down to their most powerful and condensed form, and then injected into the part of the brain that holds childhood sacred. Nobody wants to grow up to be accountants or contractors, nobody dreams of opening a laundry mat.

We want to have adventures. We want to travel the world, see crazy things, get in life threatening situations, and woo members of the opposite sex. When Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) takes off his professorial reading glasses and tweed suit and dons his dusty leather jacket, whip, and fedora he’s living the secret life that all of us long for. Over the course of this film he gets covered in spiders, covered in snakes, covered in skeletons, and is able to confidently face it all with his trusty side arm and bullwhip. Raiders is the perfect mix of everything that is awesome and dangerous when you’re a kid, and it’s got the perfect hero at the center of things to take it all on – a wise-ass rebel who follows none of the rules. He’s exactly who your dad tells you that you shouldn’t be, and still he gets to be the good guy.

But Indy isn’t the only great character that this movie has to offer. The supporting roles all become so enriched, loveable, and quotable with multiple viewings that Raiders starts to feel less like a movie you’ve seen and more like memories from your youth. The introduction to Marion (Karen Allen) is unparalleled in the history of cinema when it comes to introducing a love interest. That first scene of her drinking a burly, bloated, drunk under the table in a Nepal bar instantly positions her as the best girlfriend to an action hero I’ve ever seen. Marion is the perfect girl to fall in love with. Her devil may care grin is unforgettable; she looks pretty in a dress and she talks with her mouth full. And there are few things sweeter than the smile on her face when Indy tells the Nazis, “All I want is the girl.” Too bad he was lying. Indy is such a cad. But his buddy Sallah (John Rhys-Davies) is so jolly and accommodating that you spend most of the movie thinking that he must be pulling a double cross. Then it turns out that he’s really just the most jolly and accommodating guy in the world. Every time he breaks out into song I can’t help but find myself charmed and grinning. If only we all had a friend as cool as this guy.

On the opposite end of the spectrum is Indy’s snooty French nemesis Belloq (Paul Freeman). Belloq rules as a villain because he’s not just more unscrupulous than Indy, he’s also smarter. Belloq manipulates the natives in the beginning of the film because he knows their language. Indy, the ugly American, can’t do much other than punch, shoot at, and run from the locals wherever he goes. He’s just lucky that in the Indiana Jones universe punching a problem is usually the best way of solving it. It’s a world where that can-do Americana attitude is all you need in order to beat the Nazis and win the day for the good guys.

On a movie making level, Raiders soars. The photography is just gorgeous. Every moment is chock full of iconic images that have been burned into the collective consciousness of our culture. If you freeze on any frame in the film it could be a frame from an old comic book. And if you blew up any one of those images it could hang on your wall as art. The gorgeous photography isn’t all that this movie has to offer technically, however. The sharp editing tag teams with the beautiful imagery to make this one of the most easy and fun to watch films of all time. The action editing is absolutely unparalleled in clarity of movement, consistent spatial relations, and building a sense of excitement. The construction of the set pieces are so thoroughly thought out and well executed that they’re probably the best in cinema since Buster Keaton’s heyday. If you look at that fistfight Indy has with the burly German, it goes from simple fisticuffs, to a firefight, to a series of giant explosions, all naturally and organically as the characters traverse an obstacle course of moving airplanes, leaking gasoline, and incoming trucks full of machine gunners. And that’s just the appetizer.

The main course is the big chase sequence. It starts off with Indy chasing a caravan of trucks on a horse, then he gets off the horse and onto one of the trucks, climbs all over the truck getting into fist fights, takes control of the wheel of the vehicle, has a demolition derby showdown with a series of other vehicles, tears through encampments, sends the bad guys veering off cliffs, gets in a another fistfight while driving, loses control of the truck, climbs under the truck while it’s traveling at high speeds, climbs all the way back over the top, gets in another fistfight with the new driver, takes back control of the truck, and then gets the Ark away from the bad guys, all in one crazy sequence that develops logically and is always easy to follow. The whole scene is a miracle of movie-making.

Moment We Fell In Love

What could it be other than the very opening scene of the film? A team of explorers hacks their way through the jungle. They uncover a giant, stone face that sends one of the men screaming in fear. Their leader only appears slightly off screen, or in silhouette. He finds a poison dart in a tree. They are being pursued, but by who?

One of the locals brings the tattered pieces of a map to the man in shadows. In his pocket he holds the other half that completes the map, and undoubtedly leads to some great, lost treasure. Treason plays across one of the men’s eyes. He reaches for his pistol, ready to take the map and the riches for himself. But before he can act the man in shadows cracks a whip, knocks the gun out of the would be traitors hand, and then steps into the light to reveal himself as Han Solo wearing a leather jacket. That about sells things right there. And if it doesn’t, by the time Indy has braved giant spiders, booby traps, skeletons, bottomless pits, poison darts, and being chased by a gigantic boulder, everyone watching is gaga over Raiders of the Lost Ark. Or at least everyone with an operational soul is. And that’s just the first sequence. From this point on we go from South America, to Nepal, to Egypt, to a freaking Nazi submarine. Sounds like the greatest trip of all time to me.

Final Thoughts

“Top. Men.”

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Along the way, they’re hired by Dana Barrett (Sigourney Weaver), a woman whose apartment is haunted by a demonic, ancient Sumerian demigod—an entity that is far more powerful and destructive than anything the ragtag Ghostbusters have ever faced.

Why We Love It

Today, a growing number of big-budget, big-name comedies rely on Frat Pack-Apatowian absurdity and non-sequiturs. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this—I enjoy watching 1970s anchormen dueling to the death as much as the next person. But the humor in Ghostbusters is firmly grounded in scene, situation, and character; the astute attention paid to this very basic rule of comedy, and storytelling in general, is, I think, what makes the movie so accessible and also what makes it classic.

In one of my favorite moments—a little bit of dialogue most likely overlooked by anyone who hasn’t watched the movie some four-thousand times (then again, who hasn’t watched Ghostbusters four-thousand times?)—Janine Melnitz (Annie Potts), the team’s secretary, asks Egon if he has any hobbies. His reply: “I collect spores, molds, and fungus.” Ramis’s delivery here is droll, deadpan, completely in character, and exemplifies the masterful simplicity of so much of the film’s humor. (Incidentally, if you’re ever on a date or meeting someone for the first time, and you’re asked about your hobbies, it’s crucial that you repeat this line—it is a surprisingly effective litmus test).

Considering the ghost conceit, it wouldn’t be difficult to imagine another version of this movie, a version nowhere near as successful or beloved, filled with over-the-top slapstick and caricatured performances. Fortunately, the tone of the screenplay and acting in the version of the film that we do have, is understated and refined—the perfect contrast to the high-concept storyline and visual effects. The juxtaposition of tone and subject creates an odd sort of realism. That realism, I feel, is one of the things that make Ray, Peter, and Egon so endearing.

Of course the other, more obvious, thing that makes these characters so endearing is the fact that they’re played by a group of fantastic comedians—each one exquisitely attuned to what is and is not funny, each one charming in his own way. Ghostbusters was released in 1984 and, at the time, Murray, Aykroyd, Ramis, and Rick Moranis (who plays Louis Tully/ “The Keymaster”), were all really just beginning their careers. However, the projects that they’d been involved with prior to filming—SCTV, Saturday Night Live, Stripes, Caddyshack, Animal House—had already established and distinguished them in the comedy world.

The entire cast is marvelous—everyone having a few brilliant moments throughout—yet, the two standouts, for me, have always been Murray (naturally) and Moranis. As I write this, I’m finding it difficult to resist the urge to simply rattle off every bit of wry, waggish dialogue uttered by Peter Venkman. However, there is one scene in particular that never ceases to amaze me with its genius. Sigourney Weaver’s character, recently possessed by Zuul, minion of Gozer and clearly in heat, says, “I want you inside of me.” Venkman replies, “sounds like you’ve got at least two people inside of you already. Might be a little a crowded.” A bit later, she says in a deep, raspy, demonic voice, “there is no Dana, only Zuul.” Venkman’s response: “What a lovely singing voice you must have.” The scene is just this divine confluence of impeccable comedic timing and horror.

As for Moranis’s performance—which, apparently, was heavily improvised—it’s, yet again, hard to think of moment that isn’t superb, especially once his character, Louis, is possessed by Vinz Clother, another of Gozer’s minions. He is, sadly, the character I relate to most.

Finally, there’s the soundtrack. “Ghostbusters,” the film’s theme song, performed by Ray Parker Jr., is particularly infections and somehow just as quotable as the movie itself. Any time someone asks me, for whatever reasons, who I’m going to call, I instantly, and without thinking, say, “Ghostbusters,” regardless of how inappropriate a response that might be. It’s like a reflex, something that I’m compelled to do even though no one ever thinks it’s funny. I know I’m not the only one who does this, which is probably evidence of how deeply engrained this movie is into our collective consciousness.

Moment We Fell In Love

If, like me, you were a child the first time you saw it, you were probably most impressed by the overall scope of the movie. The action, the special effects, the proton packs, the wanton destruction of hotel ballrooms, just the sheer scale of the thing. It all created this tremendous since of awe. You wanted to be a Ghostbuster.

Now, though, as adults I think you’ll agree that the most quintessential moment is not the final act, in which the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man stomps through the city, as some people might lead you to believe. It is instead the following line, delivered by Mr. William James Murray as the Ghostbusters attempt to characterize the destruction that everyone has to look forward to if the guys aren’t allowed to bust ghosts: “Human sacrifice, dogs and cats, living together, mass hysteria.” Those words are inscribed on my heart.

Final Thoughts

A couple of years ago, my 3-year-old cousin saw a Ghostbusters poster that I have and said, “hey, I like the Ghostbusters.” His agitated tone and the way he emphasized the “I” actually made it seem as though he was upset and somewhat baffled by the fact that we had this common interest. Here he was, born more than 20 years after the movie was released, and he felt some kind of ownership over it. But I think this just shows how timeless the movie is. It belongs to my cousin just as much as it belongs to me. The movie really does hold an important place in our collective consciousness—you can witness this in department stores that still carry Ghostbusters shirts or hear it in the way that the phrase “don’t cross the streams” has been incorporated into the lexicon and repurposed. Ghostbusters spans genres, it spans generations, it’s an amazing movie, from start to marshmallow-covered finish.

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“A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…”

On a desert planet on the far edges of the galaxy, a young farm-boy named Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) dreams of leaving his meager existence behind to join the Rebellion against the evil Galactic Empire.  When his uncle, a humble moisture farmer, purchases two unassuming droids that carry coveted secret Imperial data for a titanic space station, Luke finds himself thrust into the war much sooner than expected.

Together with the reclusive Jedi, Obi-wan Kenobi (Alec Guinness), an elderly warrior who used to be one of many guardians of peace in the galaxy, Luke sets out on a quest to deliver the plans to the Rebellion, learning more about the father he never knew, his inherent ability to control the Force, the mystical energy that gives all Jedi their supernatural abilities, and encountering a motley crew of characters along the way including the displaced Princess Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher),  self-serving smuggler Han Solo (Harrison Ford), his 7-foot tall furry co-pilot Chewbacca (Peter Mayhew), and master of the Dark Side of the Force, Darth Vader (David Prowse/James Earl Jones).

Why We Love It

It actually took me about an hour to write that summary; not because I haven’t seen Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope (which from now on will be referred to simply as Star Wars) enough, but because I’ve seen it way too much.  That might not make much sense at first, but if you’re like me and have lost count of how many times you’ve watched through the original trilogy, think about that for a little bit and you’ll realize that Star Wars is so ingrained in us as both film nerds and as society that we don’t even really have to think about it anymore – we just know it.  It’s part of us. It’s like breathing – nobody needs to think about breathing, we just do it because we’ve been doing it for so long.

Somewhere out there are certainly a rare and segregated number of people who have either never seen or don’t care for Star Wars, but even they’re familiar with the names and terms that George Lucas created 34 years ago: the Force, the Death Star, Jedi, Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, stormtroopers – these are not just familiar terms within a popular universe, these are vocabularies permanently entrenched in the pop-culture zeitgeist.  And why is that?  I think it’s because Star Wars is one of the most universally (no pun intended) appealing films in cinema history.

You start out with Luke Skywalker.  He lives at home, he’s not overly handsome, all his friends have moved away and he’s stuck working a job he hates with little hope of getting out of his nowhere town.  He’s the nobody who wishes he was somebody. He’s 9 out of 10 people in the audience and it’s through his eyes that we experience his journey into what Obi-wan describes as “a much larger world” and it’s with his same child-like wonder that we experience it all.  Almost three decades before Harry Potter came on the scene, Luke Skywalker was the Everyman who discovered that he was anything but, possessing the potential to accomplish great things with great power he never knew he had.

And supporting him along the way are a cast of characters as diverse as those within our world, yet as consistent as the tried and true archetypes upon which they’re based.  In Obi-wan we have the wise old mentor, who we just know kicked all sorts of ass back in the day.  In Han Solo we have the badass loner who shoots first and asks questions later (no matter what Lucas CGIs), but who we’re sure has a heart buried somewhere deep within.  In C-3PO and R2-D2 we have the comic relief sidekicks.  And in Darth Vader we have the ultimate embodiment of evil, the twisted marriage of machine and man who can crush a man’s neck within his fist and who doesn’t hesitate to strike down his old master. True, all of these characters could not exist were it not for films and filmmakers who paved the way before Lucas, but that enhances the greatness of Star Wars. Like a Quentin Tarantino of science fiction, George Lucas saw what others had done before and successfully reworked the archetypes to serve his own purposes.

And it’s this wide array of influences which also lend appeal to more demographics than just the sci-fi nerds looking for space battles and laser pistols.  The older folks who had kids of their own when Star Wars first came out could appreciate the callbacks to the old Flash Gordon TV serials of their childhood.  Cinephiles of the day could look to the quickly fading Western genre and appreciate the underlying themes of the dichotomy between civilization and the wasteland. The pretentious arthouse crowd would be at peace within the huddled masses because they knew that Akira Kurosawa’s spirit was alive and well within C-3PO and R2-D2 (The Hidden Fortress) and Han Solo (Yojimbo). The English (they’re a demographic, right?) were happy to see two of their legendary, aging actors, Alec Guinness and Peter Cushing, in respectable roles. And of course, the kids are happy once the lightsabers are whipped out. But Star Wars’ greatest strength lies in the omni-relatable theme of good vs. evil.  It’s a struggle that is as old as time itself and it seems that never had the sides been more clearly defined then when we saw the juxtaposition of that cold, black helmet and that wide-eyed boy gazing longingly into Tatooine’s setting suns.

Moment We Fell in Love

In an effort to gain information on the location of the hidden rebel base, Grand Moff Tarkin (Peter Cushing) brings the captive Princess Leia to him and gives her an ultimatum: tell us the location of your rebel friends or watch your home planet, Alderaan, be completely obliterated by my moon-sized space station.  Simple choice, right?  Leia, as we would all do, reluctantly gives up the ghost. Grand Moff Tarkin returns the favor by ordering Alderaan’s complete and utter destruction as easily as if he was ordering coffee.  The fact that Leia’s “revelation” turned out to be a lie is irrelevant – this bastard just wiped out an entire planet without blinking because he wanted to make a statement.

At that moment we’re fully aware of how immensely evil the Galactic Empire is and consequently fully get on board with the cause of the Rebellion while also realizing how much of an uphill battle it’s going to be for our motley crew.

Final Thoughts

The fact that George Lucas himself can’t even destroy the legacy of Star Wars despite his best efforts with the new trilogy just confirms how powerful and long-lasting the film really is.  I’ve spent almost 1200 words writing about the first installment in what has become an immortal series and I’ve barely scratched the surface. Lucas wore his inspirations and influences on his sleeve in the creation of Star Wars, a film that many people forget was passed up by almost every studio in town, and in turn created something that would inspire and influence an entire generation of filmmakers to come after him.

Nowadays we may curse the name of George Lucas for “ruining my childhood” or “pissing on his own legacy,” but no matter what he’s done in the last decade, were it not for him, May 25, 1977 would mean nothing to the history of cinema, we wouldn’t have spent so many hours in college playing “Knights of the Old Republic,” we wouldn’t look at those elongated fluorescent bulbs with aspirations of sword fighting and, most importantly, we wouldn’t have The Empire Strikes Back.

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The lack of humility before nature that’s being displayed here, uh…staggers me.

After building a theme park populated by dinosaurs, eccentric old billionaire John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) invites two top dino-scientists (Sam Neill and Laura Dern), a rock star chaos theory expert (Jeff Goldblum), and his grandchildren to come check it out. Fortunately for everyone involved, a horrible security breach unleashes the dinosaurs, and their lives are all terribly threatened.

Why We Love It

I’m 9-years old sitting in a packed theater ready to see, for the first time in my life, dinosaurs on a giant screen. Sure, I’d seen Harryhausen’s prehistoric creatures at home on television, but this was different. I was on the edge of my seat before the film even began and clenching the armrests throughout the entire run time. In some ways, I wish that I could go back to before I’d seen the movie – to experience that type of excitement again, one that gets washed away after the images have danced around in your head. It’s pure, childlike, cinematic bliss.

I got to see Jurassic Park at just the right age. It’s a film that’s perfect for persons 9 to 90, but I think there’s something special about seeing it before you’re even a decade old. Everything in your world is already magical enough, you’re still learning about how things work on a basic level, and then all of the sudden someone tells you there’s going to be dinosaurs on screen. Flippin’ dinosaurs? What more could a science-camp-attending fifth grader want out of life?

And oh how real those dinosaurs looked.

The moment that Dr. Grant looks up out of the Jeep and he (and we) get to see the awesome sight of a grazing Brachiosaurus followed by the full expanse of sprawling extinct life roaming around the marsh. The blend of minimal CGI with Stan Winston’s practical creations perfects the illusion that Speilberg took a film crew in a time machine to the Cretaceous. That’s the kind of moment film was invented for.

It turns out there’s a lot of moments like that in Jurassic Park. There’s also a lot of quotable lines. In fact, there’s so many that no one will watch the movie with me because I insist on shouting “Dodgson! We’ve got Dodgson here!” and “Tim! No, Tim!” when I should be silently watching in awe. These lines come from a full stock of brilliant characters that are brought to life by a fantastic cast. It’s rare in a movie where every single character is memorable, but even the quarry foreman at the beginning of the movie leaves us with, “You’ll never get Grant out of Montana. He’s like me: a digger.” Memorable lines from side characters. Who knew.

First, there’s Grant. A hero in an older sense of the word who stands up for what he believes in and protects the innocent at all costs. Yet, he’s made completely human by his failings. He’s also made human by a clear romantic connection to Dr. Sadler that’s never fully fleshed out, keeping a cliche love story out of an action/adventure film. Sadler herself is warm and strong – a member of a short list of well-rounded, strong female characters in recent film history. She’s written incredibly well, and Laura Dern nails the part, delivering lines like “We can discuss gender roles in crisis scenarios when I get back,” in response to Hammond’s faux chivalry in such a way that we don’t even realize it’s a fairly progressive concept.

And  then there’s Malcolm. Has there ever been a better character? Maybe, but he’s up there at the top. The guy is always looking for the future ex-Mrs. Malcolm, struts around despite being a total nerd, and is the only person at the beginning that sees the island for what it is. He also gives us nuggets of truth to take home with us. Because of him, I know that life finds a way and that I should wash my hands after having them elbow-deep in a pile of Triceratops feces.

Even the kids aren’t that horrible. Usually a film with children is automatically hobbled, but here are a couple of children that are both accurately portrayed (as annoying wastes of space that are putting more lives at risk because they can barely take care of themselves) and as endearing (and by “endearing,” I mean “not totally, epically annoying). In fact, as the children get used to the constant rush of running for their lives, they take part in one of the scariest enclosed-space chase scenes I’ve seen, tearfully eluding two very clever raptors in the kitchen.

Hammond is great. Muldoon is great. Ray “Hold on to your butts” Arnold is cool with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. Hell, even Nedry is a great character even if it’s more fun than it should be to see him covered with poisonous dino-spit.

They all populate a world that is breath-taking and brilliantly, beautifully shot. The tender human moments are followed up by riveting scenes of giant teeth ripping through human flesh and the world’s best predators stalking their prey. The dinosaurs, as epic as they are, are also utterly scary. Having the raptors be the main villains instead of the T-Rex was a stroke of genius for Crichton, and it’s great to see the action and the horror elements of a story like this taken seriously. It’s a dangerous world, and it’s treated with all the weight that it should bring. It could have easily been campy, but instead, it’s damned terrifying.

Plus, all that terror is accompanied by a triumphant, moving, creepy score by John Williams. Yet again he’s created an iconic score and main theme for an iconic movie. Just try not to let it get stuck in your head.

All of these elements come together to make one of my favorite movies, a movie that’s worthy of intense praise, a movie that will most definitely stand the test of time as a classic. Master craftsmen coming together with a strong story that should resonate with audiences of all ages.

But it definitely helps if you’re 9-years old. For most, it’s a fantastic movie. For a kid, it’s transformative.

Moment We Fell In Love

Like all Movies We Love, there are a ton of memorable scenes. I’m tempted to choose the scene where Grant lies on top of the injured Trike and rises up and down with its breathing. It’s a touching moment that shows the wonder and respect and joy he feels for these things he’s studied for so long but never imagined he’d get to see or interact with. There’s also the T-Rex attack (or even the water ripple scene preceding it). Tim flying off the electric fence. The herd flocking this way. The introductory video (“Hello, John!” “Well, hello, John!”). The list goes on.

But out of these, I chose a very small moment that happens just after Grant leads young Lex (Hammond’s granddaughter) down the ledge after the initial T-Rex attack while a Jeep dangles overhead. They get to the ground, and she frantically hyperventilates, “He left us!” – clearly shocked that the bloodsucking lawyer would run for safety while innocent children were in danger.

Grant steadies her shoulder, looks her dead in the eye and says, “But that’s not…what I’m gonna do.”

Even after saving everyone and proving his wits and strength, it’s the first sign we get that proves Grant as a total bad ass. Pants-shittingly frightening dinosaurs are attacking them, and he is resolute in the dedication to make sure those children get safely back to their grandfather. He’s unwavering and shows the kind of confidence that calms Lex down and makes the audience believe that he might just get everyone off the island alive.

Final Thoughts

This movie is just so nearly perfect that it’s hard to comprehend. It doesn’t even really look all that dated upon my 29th viewing. I will say that it deviates a ton from the book, but for something like this story it seems necessary – or like it worked out pretty damned good irregardless. The story, the lines, the characters, the acting, the camera work, the score, the effects, the tone, the pacing. It’s all done so well and woven together to make an action film with brains, a science-fiction film with humor, and a character study with dinosaurs eating people. Genius.

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“Have you ever tried…not being a mutant?”

Synopsis

After a solitary mutant who can teleport attacks the President, a secret military squad led by a man named Stryker (Brian Cox) is given carte blanche to find and capture the students and teachers at Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters. But the mutants, especially Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), recently returned from his trip to the North, aren’t going to go quietly.

Instead, the team made up of Storm (Halle Berry), Jean Gray (Famke Janssen), Rogue (Anna Paquin), Iceman (Shawn Ashmore), and Pyro (Aaron Stanford) work to seek out the squad’s base where they are holding the captured Professor X (Patrick Stewart). But the X-Men aren’t alone. Joining in the hunt is the telaporting assassin, Nightcrawler (Alan Cumming), Magneto (Ian McKellan) and Mystique (Rebecca Romijn), who have called a truce with the team in what may be an inevitable war with the human race.

Why We Love It

There’s a natural acceptance among the finer geek culture that the second part of a comic book superhero franchise has all the potential in the world of being better than its predecessor. The establishing of the hero, their world, their secret identity, and even possibly their gallery of supervillains has already been taken care of in the 90-150 minutes of the first film. The Legos have already been dumped out of the box, and the instructions have been looked over. It’s time to start building.

The best directors who handle such a franchise – Christopher Nolan and Sam Raimi to name a few but the best – understand this. So, too, does Bryan Singer. And so it goes that in May of 2003, X2: X-Men United, the sequel to 2000’s successful X-Men, was released. Like other sequels in the superhero subgenre, the film is superior to the one before it in just about every element. From the word “go,” the film locks you in for both great Summer excitement and a weighty, well-crafted narrative.

Even though there are more characters to be found in X2, hardly any of them feel short-changed, an issue that troubles superhero sequels even to this day. Films like Spider-Man 3 and Iron Man 2 are infamous for having the “weighed down” feeling, that the people behind them tried too hard to fit so many characters in that no one’s storyline feels complete.

This isn’t the case with X2, as Singer along with the screenwriters involved – too many to list here – do a fine job incorporating each character’s individual arc into the overall story at hand. When little character moments are included like the budding relationship between Rogue and Iceman, they’re done so with the backdrop of their central mission. Wolverine/Logan’s background is given the most depth, as it involves Stryker, who recognizes Wolverine and constantly teases with the promise of information. If any main character gets the short-change treatment, it’s Cyclops (James Marsden), who disappears for a long stretch of the film. He is given a few moments to shine through, especially in the film’s dramatic ending, so it almost makes up for it. However the middle of the film seems to just forget about him.

The action in X2 is of a higher and more budget-munching standard than X-Men. Lots of explosions, battles, and even mid-air chases are thrown into the keep the pace of the film going. Some of the CG involved isn’t of the highest quality, but it’s never so distracting to take you out of the excitement. In fact, the last half of X2 is one huge, action-filled conclusion with the team going through the military squad’s hidden base of operations. They arrive at the base a little over an hour into the film, and the energy is sustained for pretty much the entire last hour of the movie. This is also one aspect X2 has over other superhero movies that seem to leave the continual action out. You never find yourself bored by X2, something we can’t really say for a movie like Iron Man 2 – I swear that’s the last time I’ll harp on that movie.

And the end of X2 both gives us a satisfying conclusion to the story at and while also setting up precisely where it could go. At the time of its release, more than a few people were comparing it to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn. That comparison is not unjustified. Where the characters in this film are left at the end of X2, with the genuine weight that comes from the death of one of the major players, and with the slight tease that created fans of the X-Men comic books to instantly froth at the mouth, X2 left everyone satisfied yet chomping for a Part 3. Thankfully, Bryan Singer would return for X3: X-Men Unleashed in the Summer of 2006, and he would give us the greatest X-Men movie imaginable…oh, wait. Nevermind.

Moment We Fell In Love

The opening attack on the White House perpetrated by Nightcrawler is an action set piece work of art. With subtle hints in the very beginning that something isn’t quite right with this one particular tourist, it quickly ramps up into a flurry of beautiful camera movement, stellar stunt choreography, and even a little Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to accompany the action.

It’s a five-minute sequence that pulls the awe from the audience and primes their charges for the story that is about to unfold. And what’s more, it’s gets the audience pumped using a character that is in no way established in the film series before. We don’t know anything about Nightcrawler in this film series before that scene, but that doesn’t keep the opening of X2 from energizing us for what we are about to see.

Final Thoughts

X2 could very well easily fall into a list of the top 5 comic book superhero movie adaptations of all time. Just about every element works and works better than in the first X-Men movie. The battles are more exciting, the action is more energetic, and the characters and implementations of the mutant vs. human debate give the story a much-needed weight. It’s easily beyond the cartoonish, surface-level action of something like Fantastic Four or even the atrocity that was X-Men: The Last Stand.

Seriously, books could be written about how bad 20th Century Fox and Brett Ratner screwed over this series between X2 and X-Men: The Last Stand, but that’s not my place here. X2 is one of the best comic book adaptations in film history. It’s just a shame the open-ended story it leaves couldn’t have led to something more deserving.

You did it, godammit. They just invited us to dinner.

Synopsis

A small band of American filmmakers departs for the Amazon to document the lives of warring cannibal tribes. Two months after they’ve vanished into the so-called Green Inferno, a rescue team led by anthropologist Harold Monroe (Robert Kerman) discovers the documentary crew died at the hands of the Yanomamo tribe. Monroe retrieves the crew’s footage and brings it back to New York. The found footage depicts an orgy of shocking sadism – perpetrated by both the cannibals and the “civilized” Americans.

Why We Love It

Let’s be brutally honest. It’s rather problematic to admit that I love a film like Cannibal Holocaust. Ruggero Deodato’s film depicts utterly reprehensible behavior, and not all of it is simulated.

Cannibal Holocaust’s first film-within-a-film, a documentary called The Last Road to Hell, consists of actual newsreel footage of executions in war-torn parts of Africa and Asia. The main narrative portion depicts actual killing of animals, as does the purported “found footage” that mostly makes up the film’s second half.

It’s the presence of that stomach churning real violence that makes the act of watching and appreciating this film a morally questionable act for me. And yet, I can’t pretend that this is merely an exploitative piece of trash with no artistic merit. Despite its flaws, Deodato’s masterpiece towers above lesser grindhouse fare as an innovative, game-changing piece of outlaw cinema.

Its central conceit – that we are watching actual footage shot by the film’s doomed victims – has been copied plenty of times since. Cannibal Holocaust is not only the first, but the best example of this type of film to date.

The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield and Paranormal Activity all suffered because they unfolded their entire narratives in real-time. Cannibal Holocaust is faster and more uniformly paced because it’s a hybrid between the conventional movie narrative and the found-footage collage.

The aforementioned knockoffs also strain credulity in a way Cannibal Holocaust doesn’t. Inevitably in lesser psuedo-vérité works, the story reaches a point where I ask, “Who in their right mind would still be filming this shit? Why not just drop the camera and get the hell outta Dodge?” The answer in Cannibal Holocaust’s case is that, conveniently, the camera operators aren’t really in their right minds.

Rather than merely documenting the Yanomamo tribe in their natural state, they decide to spice things up by simulating an enemy attack on the village, burning and raping their way toward an appalling yet richly deserved comeuppance.

In a sinister twist, the film’s purported victims are shown to be the most diabolical of villains. They’re like droogs turned auteurs, grinning lasciviously as they hack people and critters to pieces; quite literally aroused by the sights and sounds of ultraviolence.

Moment We Fell In Love

The first time I watched Cannibal Holocaust was at a friend’s house, on an Nth-generation VHS tape originally dubbed from a twice-pirated laserdisc, or something like that. The first hint at what I was in for was the moment – about 20 minutes in – when one of the rescue team’s guides slices open a live muskrat’s jugular veins.

It wouldn’t be accurate to say this is a moment I fell in love with, because I’m not that much of a sick bastard. (While I’m not a card-carrying member of PETA or anything, I love animals. As I type this, I’m literally giving myself carpal tunnel syndrome rather than disturb the kitty that’s sprawled across my forearms.) But I recall that scene as the defining moment when I knew I was entering unchartered waters. Here be monsters? Damn straight.

Final Thoughts

Writing this appreciation of Cannibal Holocaust has been pretty challenging for me. I feel that in praising the film based on its artistic merit, I am somehow trying to justify the more-than-questionable content it contains.

I feel like I’m trying to walk the same fine line that the film itself treads, with arguably less success. While I find myself fumbling for the right words to capture my simultaneous sense of repulsion and admiration, Cannibal Holocaust cleverly has its cake and eats it, too.

During the sickening screenings of the gruesome found footage, the anthropologist Monroe acts as the film’s moral center. He repeatedly argues that the footage shouldn’t see the light of day because it’s offensive and immoral.

His foil is a television executive who cynically shares the truth that Deodato and other shock filmmakers have long understood: “Today, people want sensationalism. The more you rape their senses, the happier they are.”

We’ve now managed to write about A League of Their Own and Cannibal Holocaust in the same feature. Check out more Movies We Love

“Excuse me. I believe you have my stapler.”

In 1999 a group of disenchanted cubicle dwellers, led by apathetic office drone Peter Gibbons (Ron Livingston) stood up against the powers of authority to bring down a company and take a little piece for themselves.

Hilarity ensued.

Why We Love It

Mike Judge, creator of such television classics as Beavis and Butt-head and King of the Hill, proved his worth with this clever satire about white collar slavery and the standardization of office routines.

Peter is a man whose soul has been trampled on. He doesn’t ask for much – his dream is simply to do nothing. His only motivation for being productive at all is so that his smarmy boss won’t hassle him and ask him to go ahead and come in on the weekend. He suspects his girlfriend is cheating on him, and every day of his life is getting progressively worse. As he succinctly puts it “Since I started working, every single day has been worse than the day before, so that every day you see me is the worst day of my life.”

But thanks to a powerful and unfinished session of hypnotherapy, Peter finds himself in a peculiar and enviable situation. Through his newfound state of hypnotic happiness he makes himself more valuable to the company while shirking all responsibility – basically he lives the dream. He liberates himself from his situation and manages to rope his colleagues into a criminal conspiracy at the same time. Essentially, Peter Gibbons is the alienated millennium man’s hero.

Office Space takes the ennui of our mundane and standardized lives and makes it entertaining. Peter is every person who’s ever been held captive in a cubicle or worked in a mind-numbing, soul-destroying job – which is pretty much all of us – but he does something we can never do (or probably shouldn’t do…) – he gets revenge.

Moment We Fell in Love

There are a lot of loveable scenes in this movie, but the moment it truly happened has gotta be when Peter, Samir and Michael Bolton (tee hee) beat the hell out of the printer.

Both because they look like such idiots, and because it’s such a kick-ass way to get out a little office-inspired aggression.  If you even scan casually through YouTube, you’ll find a plethora of tributes and parodies (mine will be going up imminently).

Final Thoughts

If you’ve ever worked as a cubicle jockey, or had any job that slowly sucked your soul out through your pores, then you’re probably familiar with this infinitely quotable tale of modern alienation. For it is more than just a movie, more than just a satire of office life – it is an anthem for the sad saps stuck in dead end jobs the world over.

It is a cry of rage against the spirit crushing defeat of working for complete idiots. Not just for cubicle dwellers, but for those of us stuck in retail, the service industry – you name it. It’s a tribute to anyone who’s ever given a hundred percent to their job only to be escorted out by security at the first hint of a few lost dollars.

It is Office Space. And I love it.

(By the way, did you ever notice that except for a few scenes full of bloody violence it’s almost exactly the same movie as Fight Club? Discuss…)

Pick up the baseball bat and check out more Movies We Love

“We have decided how sad it is for others that they cannot appreciate our genius.”

In 1954, a murder is committed by two girls who have formed a deadly friendship. The movie opens with the pair running for help while Pauline’s mother lies on a garden path, her head smashed in.

Juliet Hume and Pauline Parker became each other’s entire world almost from the time they met when Juliet moved to Christchurch, New Zealand. The two girls, both outsiders, are obsessed with singer Mario Lanza and attracted to the dangerous Third Man character played by Orson Wells.

Hollywood is their Mecca. They retreat into a fantasy called the Fourth World fueled by their stories of the mythical kingdom Borovnia. In Borovnia they are royalty, living with the figures in their imaginations. In the Fourth World their favorite movie actors are worshiped as saints.

The relationship intensifies when Juliet is sent to a hospital to recuperate from tuberculosis. They write to each other using their Borovnia identities, slipping further into their fantasies and losing touch with reality. But reality comes crashing in when Juliet returns home. The closeness of the girls is at first seen as charming, then as dangerous when the girls form a romantic relationship. To complicate things, Juliet’s parents are divorcing and she will be sent to live with an Aunt in South Africa, for her health.

Faced with separation the girls are desperate, hatching plans to run away to Hollywood. Realizing the hopelessness of the Hollywood fantasy, they fixate on Pauline’s mother who they blame for not letting Pauline live with Juliet.
Their dreams become delusions of a happy ever after where Honora dies, freeing the girls to be together.

The decision is made to kill Honora on a day trip to Victoria Park.

Why We Love It

I know, I know! Who can love a movie about two lovesick, crazy, murderous teenage girls? I guess I can when it’s brilliantly directed by Peter Jackson. The screenplay written by Jackson and Fran Walsh won an Oscar. Of course, she would work with Jackson again on The Lord of the Rings.

The two leads, then unknowns, are perfect in their roles. Melanie Lynskey, picked out of a classroom for her resemblance to the real Pauline Parker had no acting experience, yet she thoroughly inhabits the intense Pauline. She narrates the movie, reading from the real life Pauline’s diary which depicts a girl lost in a fantasy world.

Kate Winslet had worked in television when she was chosen to play Juliet Hume. She’s a perfect contrast to Lynskey’s disheveled Pauline. Cool and elegant, she’s everything Pauline wishes she could be. From Pauline’s view Juliet lives with two perfect parents, her home is large and beautiful, the Hulmes seem to have it all. Pauline wants to be one of them, leave her crowded home where her parents take in boarders, the opposite of the upper class Hulmes.

Jackson brings the girl’s fantasy world to life, their clay figures blown up to human proportions in the Borovnia sequences. The real world disappears, the girls swept into their kingdom, a place punctuated by violent executions.

Even as the world they’ve invented springs to life, harsh reality is depicted without flinching. Jackson doesn’t pull away from the brutal murder. He has to let us see the extremes the girls went to when threatened with separation.

The Moment We Fell in Love

The scene where Juliet bonds with Pauline. The very proper-appearing Juliet is fascinated by a gruesome scar on the shy Pauline’s leg. She asks to see it again, to touch it. Juliet’s glee at the sight of the scar is her first connection to the shy Pauline. Juliet tells Pauline she too has scars but inside her lungs.

She declares triumphantly to Pauline:

“All the best people have bad chests and bone diseases. It’s all frightfully romantic.”

The scene continues with the two girls comparing hospital stays and separations from their parents setting up their retreat from the everyday world around them. We see the joining of two outcasts. They’ve found their soul mates on the playground. While the other girls play, these two bond over scars and illness.

Theirs is a relationship born of loneliness and pain which will become dark and explode in violence.

Final Thoughts

Up until Jackson made Heavenly Creatures he was the director of low budget splatter films. He could have ignored the complexity of the story, depicted Juliet and Pauline as simplistically evil bad seeds. But he went in the right direction showing two imaginative, intelligent, passionate girls who slipped too far into their fantasy world. Two girls, who by themselves might never have committed such a gruesome crime, but together, fueled by fantasy and desperation, committed an unthinkable act.

If you haven’t seen Heavenly Creatures by all means get a hold of it.  Jackson powerfully joins fantasy and reality to illuminate the dark true story of Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme.

Fall in love all over again with more Movies We Love

He was looking to try his hand at a genre he had never attempted before, Sci-Fi. So what did he do? Why, he surrounded himself with some of the people that do it best, of course. Some of those people being Steven Spielberg, Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci.

And what did the combination of these four titans give us? Why, Michael Bay’s only box-office disappointment but most under rated film, The Island.

I didn’t have the opportunity to catch The Island until three years later however when I was first starting to realize my passion for all things Michael Bay. But even on DVD I knew that this was a special film. It was a film that contained a little bit of everything and yet managed to make it, it’s own.

Why We love It

There are three groups of people that like this film: Michael Bay fans, action fans and Sci-Fi fans. And each one has their own reasons.

Michael Bay fans (which is the group I fall under) love it because the film is the man at his finest. It’s Bay trying to prove something. In this case he was trying to prove that he could pull of successful characters. And for my money, he succeeded. I really did feel for Lincoln Six Echo and Jordan Two Delta throughout the film. I could honestly believe that these two people were adults educated to the level of a fifteen year old who had no concept of an outside world. And even though there was a lot of Bay 2.0 in The Island, there was plenty of Bay classic to be thrown around as well.

Which brings me to the next group, action fans. Now this group did have to wait till about the half way point when the film becomes a non-stop chase scene. But, once The Island starts down this path, it never stops. And nothing, absolutely nothing beats that amazing highway chase that sent cars essentially floating in mid air. It is at that moment you truly know your watching a Michael Bay movie.

And finally there are the Sci-Fi fans. Bay does a great job at creating a sterile world that we get to chill in for about an hour while all the films elements are being put into place. And this world, despite a lot of advertising, is believable. In fifty to a hundred years, a place like this could totally exist.

And let’s not forget The Island‘s amazing supporting cast consisting of heavy hitters such as Steve Buscemi who becomes the films exposition man, but is able to really play up the laughs. Sean Bean as a power hungry CEO who strikes fear into the audience with his cold, empty expressions of fake empathy for the clones. Djimon Hounsou as one heck of a bad ass mercenary who finds his soul by the end of the film. And of course Michael Clarke Duncan who is simply awesome at just being Michael Clarke Duncan. I don’t think anyone will deny that Michael Bay has a really good eye for character actors and The Island is no exception. Everyone brings their A-game and it shows.

And as for the depiction of Bay’s future world is concerned, it completely works. Bay took a realistic approach to his future were technology has improved but not to the exponential point where everyone has a flying car and a micro chip in their head. Instead, Bay’s future is full of advertising and really good public transportation.

Sounds fine to me.

The Moment We Fell In Love

The Island‘s crowning achievement comes at the seventy minute mark. Lincoln and Jordan are hold up in a storage closet being chased by one of the bad guys when Jordan finds a nail gun. When the man goes to open the door, she fires three nails into his arm and the two of them get away.

This scene was full of heart-stopping tension that proved to me Bay was once again growing beyond explosions as a filmmaker. This moment also served as a bridge between the the first and second halves of the film because after this moment, no one stops running for the remainder of the movie.

It’s the first moment that Jordan and Lincoln realize that the world is a painful place. At that moment I sat up and cheered for the fugitive clones, happy to see them begin to understand the basic idea of survival.

Final Thoughts

The Island is what happens when a director wants to try something new and fresh. It’s what happens when someone wants to, even slightly, move away from their comfort zone.

The Island is a very enjoyable film with plenty for the viewer to chew on. Despite what some critics would have you believe. Whether it be the ultra intense highway chase, the final showdown or a little Steve Buscemi, The Island has something for everyone, and that’s why I love it.

Check out more Movies We Love

Does it get any better than that? Of course it doesn’t. Armageddon is without doubt one of the finest motion pictures ever created by humans. If that snippet of dialogue made audible by Mr. Billy Bob Thornton himself didn’t convince you, maybe this will.

“You think we’ll get hazard pay for this?”

I’m going to pretend you’ve been living under a rock since 1998 and summarize one of the greatest summer blockbuster films ever made for you.

So Billy Bob Thorton is sort of the head honcho of NASA and one day he’s supervising a standard in-space satellite repair when all of a sudden a meteor shower rips his crew to pieces. We then cut to New York City, which seems to always be the city that gets destroyed in big budget disaster movies, and sure enough the meteors tear through the city demolishing Grand Central Station, decapitating the Chrysler Building [insert Unstoppable joke here] and finally, in a moment fraught with unintended significance, the camera slowly zooms out to show the twin towers of the World Trade Center on fire.

Then we’re treated to quickly cut scenes of people yelling and running through hallways and trying to figure out why Keith David keeps calling. Essentially, a giant asteroid is on a collision course with Earth and no matter where it hits, it will wipe out all life as we know it. Jason Isaacs convinces the President that the best plan is to send a team to land on the asteroid, drill a big hole, and drop a huge nuke in it, thereby splitting the asteroid in two and sending the halves on trajectories that see them safely miss Earth entirely. And who’s the best deep core driller in the world? Bruce Willis.

So they send a helicopter to go pick Bruce up from an oil rig in the south China Sea, bring him to NASA in Houston, and explain to him and his daughter, Liv Tyler, that the world is about to end and he’s there Obi-Wan Kenobi-style only hope. Initially they want him to train a set of astronauts on how to drill but since “drilling’s an art” Bruce convinces them to train his crew to be astronauts instead of training a crew of astronauts on how to drill holes. In fact, Billy Bob agrees to that plan almost immediately. So a group of misfits with no business on a spaceship are humanity’s last chance. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Armageddon.

Why We Love It

We love it because we are human beings. Who doesn’t love this movie? I don’t want to be friends with that person. Take a look at the cast! The movie boasts stars like Willis, Affleck, Billy Bob, Buscemi, Owen Wilson, Michael Clarke Duncan, Will Patton, William Fichtner, and Keith David – with great people in smaller roles like Peter Stormare, a Swedish man, playing the crazy Russian cosmonaut; Andy Milder as a NASA tech; Udo Kier as a psychologist; and Lucius Malfoy himself as the smartest man on the planet. The film has an incredible ensemble cast even by today’s standards. Maybe even more so. How about the scene where Affleck starts singing “Leaving on a Jet Plane” to Liv Tyler? And then Michael Clarke Duncan starts in with his otherworldly, gravely bass voice and then Buscemi picks it up and before you know it the whole damn cast is singing? It’s funny and sweet and kind of poignant all at once.

You know what else I love? All the video simulations. The world has 18 days of existence left and NASA is spending a good portion of time and money creating video simulations of the asteroid spreading the meteor shower, the asteroid hitting zero barrier and splitting, the asteroid destroying earth…all kinds of sweet looking simulations. The best part is they are totally necessary in every way. Otherwise, how would the non-NASA normies know what the hell was going on?

The asteroid itself is also pretty great. Bay is careful never to let you really get a good look at the thing. It’s always shown in these medium shots with a bunch of zooms past the smaller meteor clouds at the front and back. And it looks like the whole damn thing is traveling with the aurora borealis swirling around it, providing really nice mood lighting for the harbinger of the end of the world.

Moment We Fell in Love

The Simpson/Bruckheimer logo? The Charlton Heston voice over narration? How early is too early? In all honesty, the first scene with Bruce Willis and Will Patton and then Willis and Affleck on the oil rig lets you know exactly what kind of film you’re in for. Willis and Patton play off each other perfectly, and the tension between Willis and Affleck is palpable. The sequence with Willis chasing Affleck around the rig, Affleck in his underwear, Willis with the shotgun, is big and crazy and epic and indicative of what’s to come. At this point, we’ve already seen the destruction of New York City. We know we’ll get the big explosive special effects that the trailer, poster, title and tagline have all promised us. But the chemistry between the actors and the clever lines and witty retorts that will pepper the rest of the film become evident during this sequence.

Final Thoughts

Armageddon is pretty much a modern masterpiece. This is painfully obvious to me, and I’m frankly shocked that my fellow Rejects never seem to mention this film. Armageddon deserves to be championed and yet you never hear a word about it on this site. It was even given a deluxe DVD release by the Criterion Collection, a self-proclaimed “series of important classic and contemporary films,” and yet our own Criterion Files column will probably get around to covering the Armageddon release around the same time they cover The Rock.

But whether the rest of the site recognizes this film’s greatness or not, you certainly can. Do yourself a favor and watch Armageddon again as soon as humanly possible. I’m sure you won’t be disappointed.

You can catch Movies We Love normally every Wednesday, but Luke felt so passionate about this particular film that we decided to run it today.

Serve the public trust. Protect the innocent. Uphold the law.

Synopsis

Welcome to Detroit, sometime in the near future. The city’s a cesspool. Its streets are overrun by homicidal criminals. Greedy industrialists, charged with protecting the common good, are bleeding the place dry. Enter Officer Alex Murphy. He’s an honest cop, freshly transferred to the city’s anarchic Metro West precinct. He’s also one unfortunate cop, savagely cut down the first day on the job. Not to worry. Thanks to the miracle of cybernetics, Murphy will rise again as the city’s most unlikely savior.

Why We Love It

Every time I watch Robocop, I’m left baffled. It simply shouldn’t be as great as it is. There’s no reason why a cheesily named ’80s action flick should double as an incisive commentary on the perils of unfettered greed. There’s no reason for a movie about a crime-fighting cyborg to wrestle with existentialism.

Frankly, all we need from a movie like this is for it to deliver a steady stream of ass-kickery, preferably leavened with some cheesy one-liners. That’s all I expected on that fateful summer afternoon when, at age 12, I settled in with a ginormous bucket of popcorn and 120-ounce Coke to watch Robocop lurch into action.

I got exactly that, but so much more. Robocop has been a film that I’ve grown into.

One of the most obvious aspects of the film that I couldn’t appreciate back then was the way it extrapolated trends in government and commerce to terrifying extremes. For decades, there’s been pressure to privatize more and more delivery of essential public services. The theory is that the private sector will always be more effective and efficient than government. Robocop humorously challenges that theory and questions whether a corporation, with the fundamental purpose of maximizing its own profit, can always be trusted to have the public’s best interests at heart. Robocop suggests that at some point, you have to draw a line.

Moment We Fell In Love

There’s one word of dialogue in Robocop that has the power to elicit an involuntary “Hell, yeah!” every time I see it.

It signals that, after a torturous journey across the River Styx and back again, our hero has emerged with his soul intact. After Robocop has just slain his arch-villain, he’s asked “What’s your name?” With a smile, he replies “Murphy.”

Is there a more perfect ending in the whole of cinema? I think not.

Final Thoughts

If the long-promised remake of Robocop ever gets made, it’s going to have fulfill a tall order. Somehow it’s going to have to, at the very least, pack the same visceral wallop and the same fast-paced but meaningful storytelling.

If it doesn’t, though, I’m not going to bitch about how Hollywood is once again desecrating my fondest childhood memories. There’s already one Robocop for the ages, and nothing will ever diminish its brilliance.

Fall in love with even more movies

“Ricky Butler says they’re nocturnal feeders.”

Tom Hanks became pretty much the biggest actor in the world once he turned to dramatic roles, but I’ve always preferred him back when he was goofy. The ‘burbs represents the pinnacle of his goofy period for me, as collaborating with a great filmmaker in Joe Dante allowed him to craft a unique, outstanding performance that anchored a unique, outstanding horror comedy. In this movie he drinks a glass of orange juice better than anyone has ever drank a glass of orange juice on film. He traverses a set of stairs after being blown up more artistically than even Wile E. Coyote in his prime. He owns his character and the screen.

The ‘burbs tells the story of a sleepy, suburban cul-de-sac that gets disturbed when a new family moves in. You see; they’re a creepy group of three men. They never come out of their house. There are weird lights and smells coming out of their basement. Their name is Klopek. What is that, Slovek? Sure, we don’t know exactly what they’re doing down there, but it isn’t normal. At least when the Knapps lived there they mowed their lawn. So, all things considered, it’s up to Ray Peterson (Hanks) and his cadre of suburban sleuths to find out what’s going on, and what they’re keeping down in that cellar.

Why We Love It

This movie is the best kind of comedy. It introduces a crew of diverse characters with big personalities and then it just sits back and watches them chafe against each other. Humor is inherent in human nature and everyday interaction, if you can write a script good enough to harness that without needing to rely on setups and gags then you’ve hit on something primal and satisfying. And once you’ve accomplished that, once you have your audience on the hook, then you can throw in a stupid gag and have everyone love you for it anyways. At one point two characters find a human bone and then scream at the top of their lungs as the camera zooms in and out on their faces. You don’t get that kind of wackiness everyday, and you welcome it even less frequently. Here I embrace it and give it a wet kiss. The ‘burbs creates characters so likable that repeat viewings become necessity. You can annoy any number of loved ones by making them watch this with you while you quote everything as it happens and laugh at jokes before the punch line.

How many watches does it take to notice that when Art is breaking into the Klopek’s basement he randomly finds a comb in the dirt, checks it’s bristles, and sticks it in his pocket? Genius.

In the first three scenes we get an introduction for every character. We instantly understand who they all are, and why they will be funny. Hearing a disturbance, Ray Peterson comes out of his house in the middle of the night to check on things in his PJs. He’s not so much vigilant as he is nosy. The next morning we get Corey Feldman blasting Circus of Power’s “War Machine” and playing air guitar on his front porch. His neighbor Mr. Rumsfield (Bruce Dern) comes out of his house half dressed and raises an American flag in his front yard. Corey Feldman is playing Ricky Butler, the street’s young punk. Dern’s Rumsfield is a veteran, the kind who could never let go of his life in the army because it was so much more fulfilling than suburban malaise. In the third scene, Ray’s morning routine is interrupted by his glutinous, loudmouth neighbor Art (Rick Ducommun). While Ray is suspicious about what is going on next door, Art is certain that the Klopeks are fiends. He tells us as much as he raids his neighbor’s fridge for left over spare ribs, a bottle of maple syrup, and a pineapple. Strap in, these idiots have some vigilante work to do.

Everyone spies on everybody else in the suburbs. It’s like they’re constantly making sure their neighbors are living lives as empty and mundane as their own. If somebody actually had something interesting going on it could ruin the whole system of suburban life. That’s why the Klopeks are such a threat. The three actors who play them are amazing in their roles. Henry Gibson plays diminutive, mild-mannered creepiness better than anyone else. Brother Theodore is hilariously gruff, and has amazing chemistry with Hanks. And Courtney Gains, well he looks like a European Napoleon Dynamite who’s never had a bath.

They stand out.

But what if they were just a weird family from a different country? In the city they probably wouldn’t even be noticed, but in the suburbs they’re instantly labeled killers. Don’t have a lawn as green as your neighbor, or a furnace as efficient? You could be cut off from the rest of suburban society before you know what happened. In addition to the surface level comedy going on, The ‘burbs also works as allegory for the secrets that lie under the homogenous, pleasant veneer of suburban life. It comments on public and private spaces. It looks at what fences and lawns do to us as human beings.

But all of that stuff is just icing on the cake. The cake is that the comedy rules. One classic comedic trope that always works with me is to present children as adults or adults as children. This movie is chock full of men acting like little boys. Ray and his friends are all bluster and stubbornness. They’re all cowards, they’re all lazy, and they’re all afraid of their wives. But they don’t know I know that. Any time you’re able to effectively expose immaturity in authority figures you can create a catharsis of laughter for your viewer. The ‘burbs skewers all of our fathers and reveals them as the frightened children they are. It makes you laugh, and it gives you the opportunity to think, but it doesn’t demand that you do. It’s the perfect thing to put on when you’re lazing about on a Sunday afternoon.

Moment We Fell In Love

The beginning of the third act. After learning that the Klopeks are going to be gone for an entire day, Ray, Art, and Mr. Rumsfield decide to break into their house, dig up their back yard, and find out where they’re keeping all of the people they kill, once and for all. Ricky Butler puts out emergency calls to all of his friends and the pizza dude. This day is going to be one to remember, and he doesn’t want anyone to miss a moment of it. At this point you’re so in love with the characters that you’re ready to follow them into any ridiculous situation. You realize that you’re already fulfilled by everything the movie has given you, but that the best is yet to come. When the Klopeks pull out of their driveway and Ray and the gang prepare to cut the electricity to their alarm system, The ‘burbs goes from being a fun comedy to being completely next level. After you’ve seen this movie five or ten times you find that you fall in love with it all over again at a different spot each time. But for that first viewing, this is the moment.

Final Thoughts

“A man’s furnace is his own business.”

There are even more Movies We Love to drool over