Norman Spencer (Ford) is an accomplished scientist living in the shadow of his mathematician father. He and his wife Claire (Michelle Pfeiffer) live in Vermont in a large and fairly idyllic house, but the relationship is strained. A large part of this strain comes from Claire’s daughter Caitlin (Katharine Towne) going off to college, leaving Claire and Norman as empty nesters.
There was a time when Denzel Washington could do no wrong. He’s always been good, able to handle an action film or a straight drama as the film needed, and while not all of his movies are good ones, he’s generally pretty watchable at worst and magnetic at best. And while I like a few of his movies from the last decade or so, his “great performance/movie” output seemed to have dwindled. Flight, then, is something of a return to form.
I can only imagine that the impetus for the screenplay started with the incident of US Airways flight 1549, landed by pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger on the Hudson River in 2009. By all accounts, Sullenberger was a magnificent pilot and something of a boy scout. Flight takes the premise of a miraculous airplane landing but posits the question of what might happen if the heroic pilot was quite a bit less of a straight shooter than Sullenberger.
By 2000, everyone knew that Tom Hanks could be the leading man in a film. He’d done enough of them by that point, had won two consecutive acting Oscars, and had been the name above the title with enough critically acclaimed and box office-successful films that his star power was well known. The question Cast Away asks is whether or not Tom Hanks can be the sole focus of a film for a large part of its running time. Cast Away runs about 2 hours and 25 minutes, and the middle 75 are just Hanks either talking to himself or to a volleyball.
For what it’s worth, Cast Away is also a long advertisement for Federal Express, particularly the first 20 minutes or so. Chuck Noland (Hanks) works for FedEx resolving timing problems and finding more efficient ways to handle packages and systems. To do so, he travels around the world being all punctual and berating various levels of FedEx employees for being slow or not caring enough about time. Se see this initially in a visit he pays to Moscow, complaining that it took more than 80 hours for the package he sent from Memphis to reach him near Red Square. I’m immediately struck by the fact that it seems that a great deal of the time issue here didn’t specifically happen because of the Russian employees.
When you watch Back to the Future, there are a few rules that are important to remember. The first one is to remember that this is a film from 1985. The bad guys here are Libyans. There was a short period of time when Libya was one of the major foes of Western style democracy. That, and a few of the jokes (“Gimme a Pepsi Free”) were funny at the time but fall flat now. The second, much more important rule to follow is that you can’t think too hard when you watch Back to the Future. This film goes to some very weird, oedipal places as well as contains some significant temporal paradoxes. The way to handle this is to ignore those parts of the film. Enjoy what’s here for what’s here and don’t worry about the places where it gets creepy. Doing this is the difference between enjoying a fun classic and losing sleep over the implications.
Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) is a fairly average movie teen with movie-issue problems. His father George (Crispin Glover) is a loser who gets bullied by a co-worker named Biff Tannen (Thomas F. Wilson). His mother Lorraine (Lea Thompson) is dumpy and unpleasant, as are both of his siblings. His family is made up of losers. Despite having an attractive girlfriend named Jennifer Parker (Claudia Wells), Marty has no self-confidence, in part because he comes from a family of known losers. Even his association with local crazy scientist Doc Emmett Brown (Christopher Lloyd) is a source of friction.
I really don’t like Forrest Gump at all. I don’t like the story, I don’t like the characters, I don’t like the premise. There’s only one character I like at all, and he gets killed. Where most people see a story of hope and a triumph of the human spirit, I see only the story of a guy who gets abused at virtually every turn of his life and is too stupid to realize any of it. Forrest Gump makes me angry, which is precisely why it’s taken me this long to get back to it. I didn’t like it the first time I saw it, didn’t like it the second time, and I didn’t like it today. As a matter of fact, I’d forgotten just how intensely I disliked this film, and I hated it more than I thought I would this time through.
A lot of people see wisdom in Forrest Gump. The most famous (and frequently misquoted) line is “My mama always said, ‘Life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.’” Twenty years ago, that was a cultural touchstone, a modern American Zen koan that people used as inspiration. In reality, I always know what I’m going to get from a box of chocolates. That’s because I’m capable of reading the little chocolate road map under the lid. This isn’t wisdom; it’s illiteracy.
I remember when Who Framed Roger Rabbit? came out. I was probably too old to really be as excited by the idea of it as I was, but I knew it would be something I had to see. The whole sell of this is that all of the great cartoon characters from the past would appear on screen at the same time. We’d see Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse on screen at the same time. I mean, if you grew up on classic cartoons, it was something that had to be seen, even if it sucked. Happily, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? doesn’t suck. Instead, it’s both an homage to all of these classic cartoons and an homage to film noir.
The conceit here is that cartoons, or “toons,” are real and actually exist in the real world. In this world, we have Eddie Valiant (Bob Hoskins), a real man who used to work private detective cases for various toons. He’s been on the skids lately because his brother was killed by a toon during an investigation. Since that time, Eddie has avoided toons, Toon Town, and most things that don’t involve a whiskey bottle. However, he’s called in by cartoon maker R.K. Maroon (Alan Tilvern) to perform a job. One of his stars, cartoon Roger Rabbit (voiced by Charles Fleischer) has been unable to concentrate on his work because his wife Jessica (a cartoon human voiced by an uncredited Kathleen Turner) has been seen around town with Marvin Acme (Stubby Kaye), a man who owns a joke factory. Roger is devoted to his wife, and Maroon wants pictures to get him to realize that she is two-timing him by playing patty-cake (yes, literally) with Acme. So Eddie gets the pictures.
