Kinematoscope

Man, I've been trying to work up the energy to write about 1959's epic Ben-Hur for the countdown project, but it hasn't been coming.

What's to say about a film that won 11 Oscars and is somehow all about Jesus while barely featuring Jesus? Stay tuned to find out how I muddle through it!

The Key Players:

Director William Wyler returns for the hat trick, star Charlton Heston makes appearance number two. His jaw remains squarely set.

In support are Stephen Boyd, Hugh Griffith, Haya Harareet, and Jack Hawkins.



Click for More...

The Story:

It's been a couple months since I watched it, so it'll be more fun to see what I can remember without leaning on wikipedia:

Heston plays Judah Ben-Hur, a prince of the Jews (?), who returns home to Jerusalem. He's reunited with his sister, mother, and one faithful servant (who has a hot daughter named Esther).

He's also reunited with childhood friend Messala (Stephen Boyd), who is a Roman primed to take over governorship of the area. Messala wants Ben-Hur to spy for the romans and turn in Jews who don't like being ruled over and opressed and suchlike- Ben-Hur respects his friend but refuses to turn on his own people. He promises to counsel the Jews to avoid violent revolt, but Messala is not pleased.

The entire plot of the film is then set in motion by a falling roof tile- yeah, a teeny little roof tile. As Ben-Hur and his sister watch some Roman bigwig parade by, she accidentally knocks a tile right onto the guy, and the police come storming in to arrest everybody. Clearly this is all part of some devious, under-handed Jewish roof-tile-based revolution!

Messala, as chief of the guard or what have you, is in position to put a stop to all this, but dramatically refuses. Ben-Hur (after a brief escape attempt) is sent to work row on a slave ship, his family's fate unknown to him.

What follows is an improbable run from shirtless rower to adoptive Roman citizen to charioteer, involving a benevolent Roman luminary, and a hilarious shiek played by a scene-stealing Hugh Griffith. All the while Ben-Hur struggles with his desire for revenge, ignoring the pacifist teachings of some offscreen fellow named "Jebus" or something.

The Artistry:

Man, I can't even begin to imagine the scope of Ben-Hur. The extras! Imagine getting that many people together before the AI CGI extras that were developed for Lord Of The Rings. Or even the matte painting stormtroopers in Star Wars.

The chariot race, of course, stands out as an unrivaled piece of action film-making. Actual horses, actual chariots, an actual crowd- it's very authentic, to say the least.

I can't say I maintain any impression of Miklós Rózsa's score, other than that it was loud when the film was loud and quiet when the film was quiet. But I hear it's one of the greatest?

Charlton Heston does an admirable job- he's great at selling Ben-Hur's genuine struggle to reconcile his friendship with Messala with his people's pride at the beginning, and he remains compelling in the fall and rise of the character as the film goes on (and on).

The ending, which we'll get to, is a little more troublesome as he has to be entirely converted into a believer by a Christ figure played by an extra whose face is never seen.

But in many ways that's the best aspect of Ben-Hur (I would assume this is true of Lew Wallace's novel as well). The focus allows the movie to deal with the large theme of vengeance and peace without getting too heavy-handed, because the story of Ben-Hur is personal instead of allegorical.

Which isn't to say it's subtle, at all. Or short. Here's my question- what was the last film to have an actual intermission? One where, like in Ben-Hur, the word "INTERMISSION" actually appears on the screen and people get up to stretch their legs?

It seems like sacriledge to say Ben-Hur could be shorter, but some of the interpersonal drama once Ben-Hur returns and sees what's become of everybody is pretty slow...


THE ENDING! SPOILERS!

So once he finally returns to face down Messala in said badass chariot race, Ben-Hur discovers his former servant and his foxy daughter destitue but still devoted to him, and his mother and sister have supposedly died in prison.

In fact, they've both become lepers, which is apparently so shameful that they demand that Esther lie to him and say they've died.

In the race, Messala drives a chariot with spikes on the wheels and tries to destroy's Ben-Hur's chariot (he also has black horses to Ben-Hur's white horses). But he ends up crashing himself and is mortally trampled.

In a final act of douchery, he reveals to Ben-Hur that his mother and sister are lepers. Dun dun Dunnn! Enraged, he plans violent revolt at last, since Romans are as much responsible for their fate as Messala himself was.

Esther, however, tells him about the sermon on the mount, and convinces Ben-Hur that Jesus could heal his family. They're too late, however, and only arrive in time to see him carrying his own cross.

At this point, Ben-Hur recognizes Jesus as a stranger that once offered him water in his slave days, saving his life. He poignantly returns the favor before guards pull him away.

The crucifixtion brings the film to its climax as Ben-Hur hears Jesus ask for the people's forgiveness even as they kill him and realizes he's been a little revenge-obessed, and then a miracle occurs in which the blood of Christ, seemingly washed down into their cave in the rainwater, heals Ben-Hur's mother and sister completely. Bonus!

So all's well that ends well. Presumably all of the Jews would recognize Jesus as their savior and king on this earth and in the next realm, and these new, so-called "Christians" would never persecute anyone themselves.

END SPOILERS


Overall: Should It Be Higher, Lower?

We'll say it should stay right here, even though for all the production value I can't say I need to sit through it again.

The Legacy:

It won a record 11 Oscars, since tied by Titanic and The Return of the King- though it is the only one of the three to have any acting awards included, as Heston won Best Actor and the hilarious Hugh Griffith won Supporting Actor.

As such, it's on lists and in vaults and everything else required of a cultural touchstone- although the only homage to it I can think of is the car race from Grease with the spiked hubcaps.

The Best Video Of It On YouTube:

Chariot time!



Leftover Thoughts:

-The nativity story is briefly acted out as a prologue. Forgot to mention this.

-I feel like this film really gets to have its cake and eat it, because it preaches pacifism but also has Messala get trampled and all. The other Roman villains are mainly offscreen, though I think Pontus Pilate is around for the washing of the hands bit.



Coming Up...

155. The Manchurian Candidate

154. Avatar

153. Scarface

It's easy to think of classic films as unimpeachable works of art- chiseled from stone, woven in tapestry. The vision, perhaps, of a black and white auteur, or the product of the finely-tuned studio system of yore. But the greatest films often have the most slipshod, haphazard tales of development: take 1946's The Big Sleep, for example.

After the best-picture triumph of Casablanca, it probably seemed like a no-brainer to cast Humphrey Bogart as another ambivalent wiseguy trying to live under Vichy rules with a piano-playing sidekick. So Howard Hawks enlisted a broke William Faulkner to transpose Hemingway's To Have and Have Not to WWII France. Despite the extensive pedigrees of those four men, the show was stolen by a nineteen-year-old Harper's Bazaar cover model named Lauren Bacall- her rapport with the middle-aged Bogart resulted in her part enlarging considerably.

And so it would be for Hawks/Bogart/Bacall volume two: give the people what they want. It turns out they want star power, sexual chemistry, long horse-racing double entendres, and classic noir.

The Key Players

Howard Hawks comes back to the countdown after two screwball comedies, Bogart we saw once, later in his all-too-brief careeer.

It was actually Hawks' wife Nancy that spotted Betty Joan Peske, soon to be rechristened Lauren Bacall, on a magazine and urged Howard to give her a screen test. The legend has it that both Hawks and Bogart (also married) fell in love with the young starlet during filming of To Have and Have Not, with bitterness resulting when she chose Bogart. Nevertheless, after imitating life in art with four successful thrillers together (Dark Passage and Key Largo being the other two), Bacall would also prove adept at comedy (How To Marry A Millionaire, Designing Woman) drama (Written on the Wind), and stage-work, winning two Tonys before an obligatory "It's Lauren Bacall!" Oscar nomination in 1996 (The Mirror Has Two Faces) and honorary statuette in 2009.

Martha Vickers takes the only other substantial role, in her biggest career success- though that might not be the case if she hadn't died in early middle age from esophogeal cancer, just like Bogart. Elisha Cook from The Killing also pops up- I think he was mostly cast to make the 5'8" Bogart look taller.



More...

The Story:

Raymond Chandler's classic gumshoe novel is rightly famous, not just for having a whole lot of twists and turns, but just the right amount of them: not so many as to be ludicrous, not so few as to be easy to guess the end.

We start with Bogart, aka most famous shamus ever Phillip Marlowe, arriving at the house of his latest client, Old Rich Father (General Sternwood). First he meets Carmen Sternwood (Vickers), whom we'll refer to as Crazed Sexpot Daughter. This is established in a wonderful scene featuring a metajoke about Bogart's height and possibly the shortest shorts available in 1946- also she tries to sit in his lap while he's standing.

Anyway, Crazed Sexpot Daughter has some gambling debts with a Fake Book Dealer, and Old Rich Father wants Marlowe to get her off the hook. Simple enough.

But wait- Vivian Rutledge (Bacall), the other daughter (and presumably a widow? This is never explained) thinks Marlowe's really been called in to look into the dissapearance of her father's Ex-Right Hand Man, who ran off with the wife of a Scary Casino Owner some months before.

Got all that? Marlowe does some simple recon, following the Fake Book Dealer from his Fake Bookshop to his house, only to hear a gunshot and a scream. He storms in to find a drug-addled Crazed Sexpot Daughter, a dead Fake Book Dealer, and a hidden camera with missing film.

Marlowe takes the girl home, but soon Vivian is blackmailed with the compromising picture of Crazed Sexpot Daughter from the camera (the contents of the photo are never explained), and goes to our man for help. But is Vivian in cahoots with the Scary Casino Owner, who was coincidentally the Fake Book Dealer's landlord, and incidentally doesn't seem to care at all about his wife running off with the Ex-Right-Hand-Man?

I'm pretty sure the suspense is gripping!

The Artistry

It's not proper film-nerd behavior to watch The Big Lebowski two dozen times before ever seeing actual noir staples like The Big Sleep, but that's what I ended up doing. I actually even saw The Maltese Falcon last month in the theater!

I even saw the random Smallville episode where Jimmy Olsen gets knocked out and has an elaborate noir fantasy after watching The Big Sleep before I saw The Big Sleep! But better late than never.

And even with too many shady thugs, offscreen murders and double crosses to really keep track of the first time through, there's a familiar rhythm and atmosphere that makes it a pleasure to watch. Marlowe falls in love with Vivian Rutledge because he always does, because she's a woman with a troubled past who needs his help. He gets roughed up by some thugs because he's ignored multiple warnings to stop looking, even after his client says to stop (technically his actual case ends when the Fake Book Dealer is shot).

My favorite character is not Marlowe, however, it's a character never seen onscreen named Owen Taylor. The Sternwood family driver, he is at one point in possession of the scandalous photo- a dumb thug named Joe Brody admits later that he knocked Taylor out and took them, to blackmail Vivian with.

But Owen Taylor still ends up dead, his car twelve feet under the ocean. But who killed him? Brody had no reason to (and no reason to hide it, if he had). The legend is that when Hawks and co. found this plothole, production halted for two days while the screenwriters combed over the book to figure it out. When they couldn't, they telegrammed Chandler himself... who admitted that he didn't know, either.

How awesome is that? Owen Taylor, killed by the plot itself! The very mood of The Big Sleep killed him, because it needed a second body to raise the stakes, and there he was: alone, unconcious, on the side of the road. Absorbed by the shadowy fog and washed out to sea. Owen Taylor is my new go-to reference for plot holes in great films- films great enough that the plot holes hardly matter.

It makes The Big Sleep even better, because there's no way a plot that messy could tie up entirely neatly, is there?

Anyway, the cast is of course excellent, even if the Bogie/Bacall phenomenon threatens to hijack the entire film (more on this later). Vickers shines in her few scenes (according to Chandler, her role was diminished because she was acting circles around Bacall), and all the character-actors as minor stooges acquit themselves just as well. Elisha Cook plays a doomed go-between with such frank earnestness that even Marlowe takes a shine to the guy.

The score I found a pretty typical "OH NO! SOMETHING BAD OR DRAMATIC IS HAPPENING" big band warble, and the noir shadows were familiarly non-descript. The crackling dialogue was filled with some wonderful lines- all my favorites I'll throw in Leftover Thoughts.

The only knock against The Big Sleep is really against the goddamned Hayes Code, anyway- racy and lewd things are left in the film but just obliquely hinted at, like the photo, or a key homosexual relationship. And the ending is softened a bit, as we'll see.

So studio pressure, a mystery killing, and the Hayes Code all mucked The Big Sleep about, and the result was still great. Just goes to show.

THE ENDING! SPOILERS THAT ARE PROBABLY IMPOSSIBLE TO KEEP TRACK OF ANYWAY!

Let me preface this by saying this is uneccesarily long and largely so I can keep it all straight for myself:

So...Marlowe tracks down the blackmailers and, despite interference from both sisters, reclaims the photo from Joe Brody, who got it from Owen Taylor (who killed the Fake Book Dealer and took the film because he's in love with Crazed Sexpot Daughter, or was) and a woman named Agnes, who was the Fake Book Dealer's assistant.

Then some random dude (that the film never bothers to mention was the dead guy's gay lover) mistakenly kills Brody in revenge.

Vivian, assuming the case is now over since her sister's debts are gone, and the murder of the Fake Book Dealer is solved (WHAT ABOUT YOUR DRIVER, OWEN TAYLOR, HUH!?), flirts with Marlowe until she realizes that he's not done with the case.

Even though she and the Scary Casino owner stage an elaborate show to throw him off the trail, Marlowe doggedly follows the right people at the right moments until Agnes tips him off to the location of the Casino Owner's wife (after a poor stooge in love with her gets killed delivering the message, which means Marlowe is really Not Letting It Go).

He goes to a secluded cabin to find said Wife, but also Vivian and some henchman that knocks him over the head and ties him up. But Vivian sets him free, long enough to shoot the henchman and drive her back to the house that the Scary Casino Owner owns.

And here's the finale, ready? Marlowe calls the Casino Owner, tells he'll meet him at the house in 40 minutes (even though he's already there- ha! landlines.). Casino Owner arrives, leaves his henchman outside, so Marlowe gets the drop on him.

And here's the rub: turns out Scary Casino Owner convinced Vivian that her sister killed the missing Right Hand Man, and has been blackmailing her ever since. In the book this is ACTUALLY WHAT HAPPENED, but in the film Marlowe sees that he has no proof, and is just taking advantage of Crazed Sexpot Daughter's frequent blackouts to be a jerk. In both versions, he just fires his gun into the ceiling and scares the Casino Owner out of the door, where he's shot by his own men (who heard the shots and figured out Marlowe was in there, and naturally got jumpy).

He calls the cops to get them out safely, and Bogie and Bacall manage to own this cheesy ending exchange:

Vivian: "You've forgotten one thing - me."
Marlowe: "What's wrong with you?"
Vivian: "Nothing you can't fix."

END SPOILERS


Overall: Should It Be Higher, Lower?

Higher, for sure. It's definitely my favorite in the genre so far (take that, Out Of The Past). They actually made another version of The Big Sleep with Robert Mitchum as Marlowe, but it was in 1978 and he was sixty! Come on, now.

The Legacy:

As popular as it was, no awards or nominations. It is in the NFR, and I did see a "Who was the best Phillip Marlowe?" poll somewhere where Bogart was absoluely crushing everyone else (Elliott Gould? Be serious.).

The Best Video Of It On YouTube:

The Big Sleep was actually finished and shown to servicemen before the studio decided the sexual tension between the two leads needed to be amped up. So they shot the night club scene where they talk for a super long time about horse racing and made countless double entendres (many of which I only got the naughty-side of, knowing squat about horses). Embedding is sadly disabled, so follow this link. The clip is from a colorized version, so brace yourself for that.

BONUS: My favorite part was when they prank call the police!

Leftover Thoughts:

-FYI, by "Fake Book Dealer" I mean a lowlife pornographer that masqerades as a book dealer, not a dealer of false books (or "fake books" like jazz musicians use).

-I kind of want to write my own version of Tom Stoppard's "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead," called Who Killed Owen Taylor? Too bad he never actually appears in The Big Sleep.

-Theorists argue that either Brody killed Owen Taylor and didn't admit it for no real reason, or that Taylor, waking up alone, now a murderer, and without the damning photo of his beloved Carmen, then killed himself- but I don't buy it.

-And now, all quotes all the time:

Carmen: "You're not very tall, are you?"
Marlowe: "Well, I try to be."

after Vivian has trouble opening his office door to get out
Marlowe: "Well it wasn't intentional."
Vivian: "Try it sometime."

Mars: "That any of your business?"
Marlowe: "I could make it my business."
Mars: "I could make your business mine."
Marlowe: "Oh, you wouldn't like it, the pay's too small."

Vivian: "The only trouble is we could've had a lot of fun if you weren't a detective."

Marlowe: "You came in by the keyhole like Peter Pan."
Carmen: "Who's he?"
Marlowe: "Guy I used to know ran a pool room."

Carmen: "Is he as cute as you are?"
Marlowe: "Nobody is." (it's impossible to describe the perfect deadpan with which Bogart delivers this reply. It destroyed me.).



Coming Up...

156. Ben-Hur

155. The Manchurian Candidate

154. Avatar

A while ago I tried to read Robert Ludlum classic The Bourne Identity, but compared to the film of the same name I found it dryer than dry. I needed a glass of water after three pages.

Instead, let's talk about the second followup to the film adaptation, 2008's The Bourne Ultimatum.

The Key Players:

Director Paul Greengrass took some time out from dramatizing important historical events like the Bogside Masssacre (Bloody Sunday) and 9/11 (United 93) to make the second and third Bourne movies, taking over from Doug Liman.

Oscar-winning screenwriter Matt Damon makes his second appearance on the countdown, limiting himself to acting this time.

Triple oscar nominee Joan Allen (Nixon, The Crucible, The Contender) and teen Shakespearian Julia Stiles (10 Things I Hate About You, O, the Ethan Hawke Hamlet that wasn't as bad as you think) both return from Supremacy to show us the CIA has a conscience.

Meanwhile, character actor David Strathairn (Good Night and Good Luck, also he was totally Kim Basinger's pimp in L.A. Confidential you guys) and familiar southern gentleman Albert Finney play the ruthless CIA bad guys.



Click for More...

The Story:

One suspects a "PREVIOUSLY, ON THE BOURNE SAGA" style highlight reel might be necessary, but it isn't. We start en media res as Bourne (Damon) runs from Russian police (I believe right after finally killing the dude that killed Marie in Supremacy). Even though he's limping, he ducks most of them, and gets the drop on two that follow him into a janitor's closet. "Don't kill me." One of them pleads.

"My argument is not with you," Bourne responds- he's begun to have flashbacks to his initial indoctrination into the supersoldier program (just in time for a third film!).

Sometime later he goes to London to track down a journalist for The Guardian that's mentioned 'Jason Bourne' in an article or two. Of course this journalist has also caught the attention of the CIA (chiefly David Strathairn's ruthless Deputy Director Noah Vosen). Despite Jason Bourne, smartest man in the world, and his clever dodging tactics, the journo ends up dead at the hands of a CIA sniper- though Bourne takes his notes before getting away.

Bourne tracks the CIA leak that was speaking to the dead guy to Madrid (Vosen and co. right behind him), and makes an unlikely ally in Nicky Parsons (Stiles). They follow the leak to Tangiers, Morrocco, and a crazy chase ensues to stop another CIA "asset" from killing the guy.

But then he blows up. Sensing a pattern here? After being forced to yet again kill another supersoldier just like himself in order to survive, Bourne sends Nicky on the run and takes the fight home to America.

The Artistry:

I was interested to turn a critical eye on the third Bourne movie- even though it's by far the most critically revered of the series, it's still a pretty straightforward action movie. What did it do any better than the first two?

The first half of Ultimatum in particular, in which Big Bad CIA dude Strathairn has the upper hand and Bourne spends a lot of time and energy trying to talk to two dudes who promptly get killed, might be a labor to watch.

But the first big sequence, involving a sniper, security cameras, and a cleverly placed pre-paid cellphone, is still riveting cinema- excellently staged and paced, plus the cellphone bit is just clever (and if I had a lot of money to waste on phones I would do it to strangers all the time). The chase through Madrid, however, is kind of a bore, since it consists mainly of people staring at maps on computer screens and a bafflingly naieve guy that we know is about ot explode.

But it doesn't take that long, and the Bourne brand has always been about delaying answers with well-made action setpieces. Plus, instead of regrouping after Bourne is foiled again, Ultimatum moves headlong into a stunning pursuit of the Evil Agent guy through the streets to keep him from killing Nicki.

His eventual takedown of the rival assassin, Desh, is punctuated by my favorite close-quarters weapon of the series (a book!) and that famous shot where the camera follows Bourne as he jumps from a rooftop, through a window across the alley.

The Bourne Ultimatum reaches real heights with that sequence, taking the raw energy and realism of the prior films and ratcheting everying up a few notches. The entire film contains several intentional homages to the previous two (I didn't realize we were so sentimental about them)- wikipedia has the full list.

You almost don't ever need to see those two again- but just almost. Supremacy of course began with the shocking death of Bourne's girlfriend Marie, and Greengrass and Gilroy make the wise choice to have that death still reverberate strongly- Damon plays the pain and remorse well, and it's a welcome additional motivation for the character, since 'who am I?' is getting a little old at this point.

Joan Allen throws a welcome wrench in the formula as well, since Bourne finally has an ally on the inside. This leads to a brilliant endgame...

THE ENDING! SPOILERS!

In a brilliant retconning of the closing scene of Supremacy, Bourne calls the only CIA stooge with a conscience, Pam Landy (Allen), who covertly passes him the address of the supersecret training facility. He tells her to meet him in the park, then strolls into Vosen's office while the entire teams goes there to intercept him.

He finally gets to the final showdown with Finney, the brains of the whole operation, who reveals the somewhat-shocking truth: Bourne volunteered for the program by shooting an anonymous man in the head, just because they told him to.

Although it's clear that he does so after a fair amount of psyche-breaking-down type conditioning, it's just as clear that he does it willingly. The lesson here, just like in Total Recall, is that sometimes wiping your memory can make you a better person.

Bourne decides not to kill Finney, and escapes to the roof. There he is confronted by another CIA assassin that he spared earlier, who spares him in turn. Vosen gets a cheap shot in as Bourne jumps into the East River. I bet you can guess if he dies or not.

Also Landy faxes some documents somewhere and the bad dudes go on trial for being jerks, or something. Hooray!

END SPOILERS


Overall: Should It Be Higher, Lower?

Slightly higher. It serves nicely as a summation of the whole series which saves us all a lot of time in the long run.

The Legacy:

Well it won three Oscars, and I guess there's going to be a Jason Bourne-less fourth movie (directed by Tony Gilroy). So that's something.

The Bourne series on the whole had an effect on the overall grittiness of the action genre in the last decade, exemplified best by James Bond's transformation from a cufflink-adjusting eyebrow raiser (Die Another Day) to a badass that strangled people to death in men's restrooms (Casino Royale).

The Best Video Of It On YouTube:

Because it's fun, a side by side of the recreated scene from Supremacy.



Leftover Thoughts:

-Also it's strongly implied that Nicki knew Bourne (nee Jason Webb) intimately before he became a super soldier and lost his memory, but it's quickly moved past and never revisted, which I liked.

-Julia Stiles' wordless reaction after Bourne kills Desh is some great acting. It boggles me that she's spent so much of her career choosing terrible scripts.

-Rumor has it that Tom Stoppard did an uncredited polish on the script, further proof that he is awesome.


Coming Up...

157. The Big Sleep

156. Ben-Hur

155. The Manchurian Candidate

"Okay, campers, rise and shine, and don't forget your booties 'cause it's cooooold out there today."

"That's right woodchuck-chuckers, it's GROUNDHOG DAY!"

The hilarious, seminal, mind-bending (gently, but still) 1993 classic comedy is today's subject on the countdown- it's funny: every time I approach a classic movie hesitantly, because what could I possibly have to say about a movie so ubiquitous and beloved, I find myself pondering deeper questions and writing even more than usual.

It bodes well for the future of the countdown, I would say. In any case, let's do this.

The Key Players:

Ivan Reitman's fame as a director (Caddyshack, National Lampoon's Vacation, Analyze This) is arguably equal to his fame as Egon from Ghostbusters one and two.

Bill Murray (whom we saw briefly once already) rose to national prominence as a wild man on "Saturday Night Live" and in Meatballs, Stripes, and Caddyshack. And he's had a resurgent decade on the strength of his world weary performances in Lost In Translation, Rushmore, and The Life Aquatic. But really, didn't that essential "Bill Murray" persona already exist in an earlier form in his 90s hits like Scrooged and Groundhog Day anyway? Arguably even his unprofessional parapsychologist in Ghostbusters used nihilistic humor to mark an inner sadness. There's a case to be made here, but we don't have the time or space.

Remember Andie McDowell? She used Steven Soderbergh's breakout hit Sex, Lies, and Videotape as a springboard to co-headlining a bunch of romantic comedies like Green Card and Four Weddings and a Funeral. Just as Murray can be seen embracing his age in an ironic way, she's a spokeperson for L'Oreal these days that would like you to know you can postpone it.

Chris Elliott and character actor Stephen Tobolowsky appear in support.



Click for More...

The Story:

A sci-fi premise with none of the expository trappings you'd expect, Groundhog Day stars Murray as a vain, cranky Pittsburgh tv weatherman assigned to cover the Groundhog Day ceremonies in Puxatawney, PA for the fourth year in a row.

He drives out the night before with a wise-cracking cameraman (Elliott) and his new producer (McDowell), and wakes up a miserable day of well-beneath-his-taste small town pleasantries- he's even trapped in town for an extra night by a blizzard just out of town, the same blizzard he predicted would miss the area altogether.

He goes to bed, he wakes up to the same song ("I Got You Babe" by Sonny & Cher), same radio dj patter as above. He soon finds he's repeating Groundhog Day, all over again, but nobody else seems to remember doing it all before. Every time he goes to bed, he wakes up to the same clock, the same song, the same town, the same day.

The Artistry:

Groundhog Day started out as a very different kind of movie. In the first week of shooting, some of the most expensive scenes were produced- Murray's character, realizing that there were no consequences to any of his actions, gets his hair cut into a mohawk, and destroys his room at a bed and breakfast with a chainsaw, only to wake up and have everything restored.

Harold Ramis, after the production spent thousands on mohawk hairpieces, duplicates of destroyed props, and scenery restoration, took a look at the footage, decided 'nope', and tossed it out.

Instead, after the second time through the fateful day, a visibly shaken and confused Murray goes to bed, but breaks a pencil and puts it on the nightstand before falling asleep. 6:00 AM, and the pencil's whole again, and this quiet moment (in place of an over-the-top mohawk/chainsaw test) sets the character down a more existential path.

How do we tell the difference between things we want and things we need? If everything in our day to day routines was taken out of the equation, how would we choose to pass the time? What would give us purpose?

This is what Groundhog Day asks, or at least specifically asks Murray's Phil Connors. He first moves from confusion to a sort of glee at living without repurcussions (seducing a local woman, robbing a bank) to a single-minded pursuit of Rita, his kind-hearted producer.

The reasons for this are unclear, other than Rita being one of the constant presences in his "day" (no matter what he chooses to do, she'll at least seek him out to see why he blew off reporting the groundhog ceremony) and being totally early-90s-hot. A masterpiece of editing follows in which, bit by bit, he learns little things about her and treats her eventually to a "perfect" evening, but no matter how many times he orders her favorite drink, recites French poetry, and says cliche things about wanting children, he's usually met with a slap in the face.

Even with an eternity to smooth it out, trying too hard isn't the answer. A depression sets in, where Phil attempts many times to commit suicide (highlighted by the film's comic apex, the car chase with Phil the groundhog)- given the timing, it seems brought on by his inability to score Rita, but it's really the last vestige of a man with everything stripped away- even when it's funny, Murray's trademark hangdog expression is perfect for this sort of despair.

The real beauty of Groudhog Day is in the final third, when Phil finds purpose by helping the townsfolk and learning various skills (ice-sculpting, classical and jazz piano) since he has the time. Even as he acknowledges his limits when he's unable to save the old homeless man, Phil learns that our lives are defined by the idle hours we pass with ourselves as well as our impact on the community around us, even one that doesn't remember you.

What makes the film a classic is that this Frank Capra-like life lesson is more or less a backdrop to hilarious scene after hilarious scene. The comic timing of the most depressing and uplifting elements of Groundhog Day prevent it from even approaching maudlin. One of my favorite examples is Phil's eloquent, expressive speech that capitvates the entire crowd by the last "day": the cut right into the middle of the scene elicits the biggest laugh from me, every time.

Murray's performance is of course integral to the film and well realized but McDowell has an important torch to carry as well. She has to be tolerant enough of Murray's crass persona in the beginning to sell falling for him later, and naive enough not to doubt his sudden (to her) transformation for too long. It helps that her character has just met Phil. Chris Elliott meanwhile plays a pretty good Chris Elliott, just like he does in guest appearance on every other sitcom in the last decade.

It's hard to really judge the cast- I know their parts so well and saw this movie first so long ago that they're nearly actual people in my mind. They exist in a Punxatawney that grows more familiar with each repetition, populated by the sort of regular, midwestern folk that I know well (at least cinematically).

Groundhog Day is an allegory for the filmmaking process as well. Take after take after take, all to find which one has the spirit, the feel that the picture needs. The editing determines the resulting product just as our decisions determine the outcomes of our days.

As mentioned up top, with the wrong choices, Groundhog Day could have become a much different film: a funny one, sure ("Oh that crazy Bill Murray!"), but more run-of-the-mill funny than deep-thinking funny.

If I have one, minor critique of the film it would be the too-obvious soundtrack choices, like Ray Charles' "You Don't Know Me" to the montage of Phil's failed attempts at Rita (because he, like, totally doesn't really know her, get it?), or "Weatherman" by Delbert McClinton.

Finally, I can't say enough about the decision not to explain the basic premise: apparently an early version of the screenplay had a gypsy curse or some such thing. Explaining it in any fashion would make the movie something else entirely- trying to ground it in any real-world or other-worldly phenomenon would make it cheaper somehow, and less universal.

THE ENDING! SPOILERS!

After an indeterminate amount of Groundhog Days (Ramis estimates as much as 40 years' worth), Phil appreciates life, wows the entire town and Rita on one especially fine day that culminates in Rita winning his company in a bachelor auction.

The next morning, the alarm goes off, and "I Got You Babe" plays...but it's a fakeout, as Rita shuts off the alarm and Phil freaks out.

It's a new day, and they run off in the snow to the tunes of "Almost Like Being In Love." Aw.

END SPOILERS

Overall: Should It Be Higher, Lower?

"If you gotta shoot, aim high. I don't wanna hit the groundhog."

The real question here is where the F%&%^ is Ghostbusters, countdown voters? For all my meaningful bluster you just read, sometimes funny is just funny, too.

The Legacy:

This would win the BAFTA for best original screenplay, but go largely unrecognized otherwise. Today it's revered as one of the most spiritual films of our time by Buddhists and Catholics alike, already preserved in the NFR, and the title is instant shorthand for the time-loop concept, or any unpleasant, recurring situation (especially in the military, for some reason).

The Best Video Of It On YouTube:

"There is no way that this winter is ever going to end, as long as this groundhog keeps seeing his shadow. I don't see any other way out. He's gotta be stopped....And I have to stop him."



Leftover Thoughts:

-Stephen Tobolowsky, AKA annoying insurance salesman Ned Ryerson, has an excellent podcast at Slashfilm- the episode where he reminsces about Groundhog Day was an immense help in writing this article.

-Question: didn't he ever try and stay up until six the next morning? I might not be yet in my middle age, but how hard is it to stay awake 24 hours if the very nature of TIME AND THE UNIVERSE is at stake? Just a thought. He probably would just instantly be back in bed at 6 on Groundhog Day again at that instant, anyway, since not even his death breaks the cycle.

-"I don't know, you're a producer: think of something!"

-"What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?"

-A good metaphor for how this film affects me is the look on the face of the dude on the stairs when Murray recites some Coleridge, kisses him on both cheeks, and departs with a pleasant "Ciao!"

-The day this is posting we're expecting -25 degree sind chills here in Milwaukee, which seems appropriate.


Coming Up...

158. The Bourne Ultimatum

157. The Big Sleep

156. Ben-Hur

There are composite films like previously covered Crash and Magnolia, that weave many storylines together, and there are anthology films like Paris, Je T'aime and Coffe & Cigarettes which present separate short films, one after another.

Somewhere in between you have what I like to call "Tarantino films," which are organized into distinct chapters that may overlap significantly. Today's entry is structured in such a way.

The pertinent question, though- is it ever necessary? Let's see how we feel after Amores Perros, part one of Alejandro González Iñárritu's mission to DEPRESS THE ENTIRE WORLD.

The Key Players:

Our director, whom I'll simply refer to as AGI frow now on for accent/tilde related reasons, has since completed his "Death trilogy" with the similar in tone 21 Grams and Babel, about miserable things happening to miserable people. Word is that this year's Javier Bardem starring Biutiful will be an awards contender as well.

Screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga spent three years writing Amores Perros, and went on to collaborate with AGI until a bitter falling out about writing credits drove them apart. He made his directorial debut with The Burning Plain, yet another morose composite film that was received with a shrug.

A large ensemble cast boasts on Gael García Bernal (Y tu mamá también, Blindness) as the only future luminary amoung many other recurring AGI players like Adriana Barraza.



Click for More...

The Story:

The film is divided into three chapters, though the other two plotlines are briefly touched upon in each one.

1. Octavio and Susana- García Bernal plays Octavio, a man smitten with his hoodlum older brother's young wife, and takes to dogfighting to make the money to run away with her. His family dog Cofi, turns out to have a knack for it, and goes undefeated as Octavio and his friend Jorge make plenty of cash- naturally this angers a local thug whose dogs keep losing, leading to a violent confrontation that ends in a car crash. Plus Susana takes the money Octavio was keeping to run away and takes off with the asshole brother instead, after Octavio has him beaten up. Aw.

2. Daniel and Valeria- Valeria, a preeminent supermodel, is gravely injured by said car crash, which leads to tension in her budding relationship with Daniel, a magazine executive who's just left his wife to be with her. When her dog (do you sense a theme?) disappears under the floorboards of their new apartment, tension escalates between them violently the longer they can't get him out.

3. El Chivo and Maru- An ex-revolutionary turned hobo hitman has taken in an injured Cofi after witnessing the car crash, and nurses the poor dog back to health- this only to come home one day to find that the newly-minted fighting champion has killed all of the other mutts that he lovingly takes care of. This seems to cause a shift in his perception of senseless killing, and how he handles his latest job to kill a man's business partner.

The Artistry:

Wikipedia informs me that Amores Perros is sometimes referred to as the "Mexican Pulp Fiction," and structurally I can see why. There's even plenty of crime, but there's virtually no humor, and no one to root for.

García Bernal carries a little bit of magnetism in the first chapter, but it's not enough to get past the abhorrent nature of dogfighting in the first place- certainly by the time he has his brother violently beaten (instead of just sleeping with his wife and then running away with her) we don't really care that he's about to get in a terrible car accident (which is actually the first scene of the film).

I'm not sure what's added to the film by making it almost a straight chapter-by-chapter anthology but teasing us with scenes of Daniel and El Chivo during the first third. The paths of the characters do intersect, but we also see El Chivo kill a man in a restaurant very early, and then we have to wait until the final chapter to find out why. It's kind of maddening, especially during the second chapter.

"Daniel y Valeria" itself feels like the beginning of a horror movie or psychological thriller edited into a different film- the blissful new freedom of the couple (as she had been a secret mistress for quite some time) is immediately marred by the car crash, and then a creeping dread sets in the moment the little dog goes under the floor. Valeria is too suddenly introduced to care for, and the earlier glimpses of Daniel being awkward around his wife (but no scene of him leaving her?) add nothing. By the time she re-injures her leg trying to get the dog out, requiring it to be amputated, the whole plot just seems terribly mean-spirited.

The final third is the best, largely due to Emilio Echevarría's performance as El Chivo, quietly dealing with the most important, or at least cinematic life events. Cofi killing all of his dogs is the best moment wrought from the screenplay myriad crossed-paths, and the scene where he can't kill Cofi in turn is the most moving.

But his attempt to reconnect with daughter, while well-played, is just another of the film's thin parables without the time to have an impact.

Amores Perros has a lot to say, and two and a half hours to say it, but I didn't really end up with anything to speak of by the end, especially not watching it for the second time for this review. There's a big difference between illuminating class differences and simply having characters from different classes, and an even bigger one between a philosophical edge and superficial grittiness.

THE ENDING! SPOILERS!

Let's see. Octavio's brother gets killed, but Susana can't even stomach the thought of being with him (also his friend Jorge was killed in the car crash while Octavio was banged up pretty badly). Valeria as mentioned loses her leg, her billboards taken down and her career over. El Chivo ties up his target and the target's half-brother that wanted him killed, and puts a gun on the floor between them and tells them to sort it out themselves. He takes the money, leaves it for his daughter with a tearful message on her answering machine, cuts his hair and walks off into the sunset with his new dog.

END SPOILERS


Overall: Should It Be Higher, Lower?

Lower. And since they're not on the countdown, I wasn't into 21 Grams or Babel very much either, though I found the former focused enough to be more meaningful.

These films that focus on misery, cutting from various tales of woe as if that illustrated some sort of connection, what are they trying to say? If the message is just "life's a bitch" (or Love, as the case may be), you can spare me the time and the ticket price.

The Legacy:

It did launch AGI as a Hollywood talent, culminating with Babel nearly stealing Best Picture from The Departed in 2004 (this was my fear, anyway). Amores Perros would lose the Oscar but win the BAFTA for Foreign Language.

The Best Video Of It On YouTube:

Ugh. Do I have to? Here, watch an hilarious fan-made version of the trailer instead:



Leftover Thoughts:

-The title doesn't literally translate to "Love's a Bitch," nor does AGI find that to be adequate. See here for various possibilities.

-Again, did Amores Perros have something to say about police corruption, or did it merely just include one corrupt cop?

-As pointless miseryfests go, it's still way, way better than Crash


Coming Up...

160. The Graduate

159. Groundhog Day

158. The Bourne Ultimatum

PREVIOUSLY ON THE IMDB COUNTDOWN: I had to review the sequel to Kill Bill LONG before Kill Bill itself- it was awkward.

But the countdown smiles benevolently on us today, as The Terminator is ranked lower than T2, so we can process everything in the right order. Phew.

What about T3: Rise of the Machines and Terminator Salvation, you ask? Good news! We don't even have to think about them, because they're both pretty terrible!

The Key Players:

James Cameron once was a self-taught special effects supervisor from Canada. But then on one magical day in the early 80s he did ten gallons of coke and wrote 873 screenplays at once (Aliens, The Terminator, and Rambo II: First Blood wer among them), hopped on a unicorn and stormed to the top of the film industry.

Subsequently he only made films as excuses for various obsessions, like his desire to see the wreckage of the Titanic, to invent a new 3D camera (Avatar), or to see Jamie Lee Curtis partially nude (True Lies). Does he seem like an insufferable jerk every time he speaks publicly? Of course! But that's the cross he has to bear, consoling himself with his mansion of frozen orphan tears and his diet of liquified Euros died to look like food.

Beginning with The Terminator, Cameron magnanimously took several actors along for the ride with him. Lance Henriksen and Micheal Biehn would both also appear in Aliens- Biehn in The Abyss, too.

Linda Hamilton will always be known primarily for her role as Sarah Connor, though Cameron did cast her as his fourth wife in the late nineties.

Finally, I have a theory. We all know James Cameron to be a man of science- he even had a plan to fix the BP spill. I propose that nearly thirty years ago he invented a time machine. High on the thrill of discovery, he went to the future, only to discover that he'd traveled too far, and found the human race just beginning to divide in twin races of pure intellect and brute physical strength. He befriended one of the latter, a huge but affable giant, and took him back to our time. But due to the future proto-man's slightly devolved intellect, he could only get work as Hollywood movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger.

It makes a lot of sense, I'm sure you'll agree.



Click for More...

The Story:

We've all seen it, so I'll be brief- AHH-nold plays a killer robot that looks like an Austrian dude sent back in time to kill Linda Hamilton, who will one day be the mother of the resistance leader in the war with machines we all know is coming. Biehn also shows up from the future, sent by her future son to protect her. Cool?

The Artistry:

Somehow I ended up seeing The Terminator at a very young age, maybe eight or nine. My memory is hazy- was it on video? At a friends house? In any case it was the first rated R movie I'd seen, and it scared the bejeezus out of me.

So I never really gave it another watch for a long time, and can't honestly say I've watched the whole thing through until doing so for this project.

Turns out it's no so scary, but still fun. I don't need to tell you how iconic the lines and images of the franchise are- though in the first installment, only Biehn's "Come with me if you want to live" and "I'll be back" made it everywhere.

And Cameron is of course a master at building suspense, even working with a terribly dated score and familiar cliches like the roomate who doesn't hear impending doom because of her headphones.

Unsurprisingly the effects, while impressive in scope, are a little dated- notably the lasers in the future war bits and the Terminator's obviously fake head when he was removing his left eye.

The script is a little leaden, especially on a human level- I never really found myself invested in the inevitable romance (really? You 'loved a lifetime's worth'?). But the performances carry it as well as they can, Biehn especially. I liked his PTSD flashbacks to the future, and the way he spoke in jargon from his own time, naming the model number (101) of the Terminator as if it would mean something.

The real basis of the appeal, and the reason so much of The Terminator has become cultural shorthand (it's probably the most popular of any "robot war" speculation), is that it taps into the innate foreboding that the future seems to hold. This will get a lot more explicit in T2, but it's easy for someone born in 1984 himself to forget that The Terminator came out during the last years of the Cold War, and even mentions the rise of the machines coming in the wake of a nuclear holocaust.

In the face of the bleak stormclouds comes the idea that we can be meant for greater things, like unassuming diner waitress Sarah Connor. What were her ambitions before this all went down? Other than being stood up on a date, her personal life is hardly mentioned. But she becomes the key to the entire future out of nowhere, perhaps simply because she exists is a world of recurzive paradoxes- she's plucked from the everyday into a harrowing trial of fire until she wins the first battle against an apocalypse rapidly approaching, and it happens seemingly for no reason at all.

SPECIAL SECTION ON PARADOXES! SPOILERS!

Speaking of causality: The Terminator franchise is nothing but chicken-egg paradoxes- John Connor send Kyle Reese back in time to become his father, so he can be born and live to send him back. What? We'll see later that the presence of the Terminator the machines send back leads to their eventual creation as well in T2.

I found myself pondering these loops as the movie went along. There were three Sarah Connors in the phone book, so the Terminator (with less information than Reese) killed the first two before he gets to our Sarah. But what if he had started from the bottom of the list? Maybe Sarah Conner becomes the Sarah Connor precisely because the other two got killed?

The other big irony is that the machines create John Connor instead of preventing his existence, because now his mother knows to prepare him to lead a war against machines in the future.

Also, I have many technical questions about time-travel itself (which the film skirts around by having Reese be a soldier unconcerned with the physics of it all). Why does Reese show up a little after the Terminator? Why can only the two of them come through (he implies no one else can come when interrogated)? Why not find some way to transport future weaponry in organic material, like the machines did? You could wrap some guns in a pig carcass or something.

END SPOILERS


Overall: Should It Be Higher, Lower?

Oh, I like it where it is, really. We'll see in a bit how T2 found a way to preserve the spirit while raising the stakes, gravitas, and action to higher levels.

The Legacy:

Careers launched, a franchise spawned, NFR inclusion already, and so on. And did you know "I'll be back" has its own wikipedia page?

The Best Video Of It On YouTube:

Literally nothing. But this unembeddable featurette includes the following pearl of wisdom:

"I think the love story is really what made it work." - Linda Hamilton

Leftover Thoughts:

-Would a polaroid photo really last 40 years in that condition?

-A quick inflation calculation informs me that this was made for the equivalent of $13 million, which makes the FX all the more impressive.

-the internet would have me believe that Cameron initially met with Scharwzenegger to discuss playing Reese, which would have been a ludicrous idea.

-One of those punks was Bill Paxton? Huh.


Coming Up...

161. Amores Perros

160. The Graduate

159. Groundhog Day

Today's countdown entry, 1986's Stand By Me, is yet another of the many classic 80s films that I missed while I was watching Flight Of The Navigator over and over and over.

From the pop consciousness at large I've gathered that's it's some sort of coming of age tale involving a corpse, a train, and the 50s. And presumably standing near one another, literally or figuratively. Let's see what I missed!

The Key Players:

Rob Reiner makes his second appearance on the countdown as director, working from a short story by the much-adapted Stephen King.

Our story follows a quartet of child stars, each of whom would go on to varying degrees of adult sucess: Wil Wheaton went from the most annoying character on "Star Trek: The Next Generation" to one of the more beloved people on the internet, somehow. Corey Feldman was ubiqitous during the 80s and early 90s, then laid low until nostalgia kicked in. Jerry O'Connell has been in over sixty episodes apiece of three different television series- can you name the two that aren't "Sliders"? And River Phoenix was poised for not only success but respectability (My Own Private Idaho) before OD-ing in 1993.

Jack Bauer Kiefer Sutherland has a supporting role, while Richard Dreyfuss acts as narrator.



Click for More...

The Story:

Four twelve year old best buds go on a quest to find a dead body in 1959. That's pretty much it. There's our narrator Gordie (Wheaton) who wants to be a writer and is definitely not just Stephen King when he was twelve at all, tough kid Chris (Phoenix), budding psychopath Teddy (Feldman), and butt-of-every-joke Vern (O'Connell). The former three deal with various father-issues throughout the story, while Vern is mostly just a goofball.

Racing the kids to the body is stereotypical older bully Kiefer Sutherland and his posse- everyone seems to imagine that finding the corpse of a kid who got hit by a train will bring them untold glory.

The Artistry:

I dunno. There isn't much I took away from Stand By Me- nothing about it was visually arresting, the child-acting was competent at best, and the story generally ham-fisted in a very Stepehn Kingish, telling-not-showing (with extra telling viz voiceover) kind of way.

40 years from now, will our era be signified solely by top 40 radio hits? The use of Buddy Holly's "Everyday" and The Chordettes' "Lollipop" felt kind of cliche to me, but that's probably not fair- there were fewer radio stations back then, I suppose. But the constant soundtrack selections seemed to do nothing more than yell "IT'S THE FIFTIES! 1959 IN YOUR FACE!" to me. Though the boys singing the theme to "Have Gun Will Travel" was a subtler touch, and I liked the low-key rendering of the titular Ben E. King song as a score motif.

The pie-eating contest (a story of Gordie's we see visualized) is a colorful, if disgusting, digression, but the only scene that stood out to me was the ambling campfire discussion- it seemed like things twleve-year-olds would actually say, and was funny to boot ("Wagon Train's a really cool show, but did you notice they never get anywhere? They just keep wagon training.")

And finally we come to one of my least favorite things: the Unecessary Framing Device. Let's discuss this behind the spoiler wall.

THE ENDING! SPOILERS!

So three of the kids cry about their respective fathers (Vern remains a goofball), then they find the body (deciding wisely to make an anonymous tip instead of glory-hounding), face down the bully, and part ways back in town.

How nice. But through voice-over, Future Gordie (Dreyfus) tells us what became of Vern, Teddy, and Chris- the chief fact being that Chris overcame the odds, became a lawyer, then got stabbed trying to break up a fight at a restaurant.

Gordie has become a successful novelist, after he was lucky enough to have his first book made into a film (which was probably Carrie but with a totally different spelling).

I don't know- it feels manipulative to me. Remember this character you cared about? He died senselessly! You're all a bunch of saps! I know this is basically Stephen King's memoir (and in fact all three of the friends in the novella "The Body" die in young adulthood), but the mechanics of the revelation bug me. What do we gain by seeing Dreyfus looking somber at the beginning and end?

Other than, of course, the eye-rolling last lines of his memoir: "I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?"

END SPOILERS



Overall: Should It Be Higher, Lower?

Maybe I'm supposed to be twelve when I see it? Lower. To be clear, that just means that I don't find it countdown-worthy, not that it's terrible. Rob Reiner was still some years away from showing us what 'terrible' means.

The Legacy:

The cloying screenplay got an Oscar nomination despite being clearly the weakest part of the film, and there's the career-launching covered above. It also led to the founding of Castle Rock Entertainment, named for the fictional Oregon setting.

The Best Video Of It On YouTube:

"The kind of talk that seemed important until you discover girls."



Leftover Thoughts:

-Now I can finally check this off of the "Popular Corey Feldman Movies I Never Saw For One Reason Or Another" List, along with Goonies, which I finally saw last year (meh). Next up, The Lost Boys.

-"Mighty Mouse is a cartoon. Superman is a real guy. There's no way a cartoon can beat up a real guy."

-My favorite part about Stand By Me in general might be the Pez line as the poster tag. That's pretty great.


Coming Up...

162. The Terminator

161. Amores Perros

160. Finding Nemo

Antarctica: is it ever any fun? It seems like with a few, penguin-related exceptions, every film that visits our forgotten seventh continent only does so to discover something horrifying buried in the ice. 1982's The Thing might just be the progenitor of this trend.

The Key Players:

Thriller maestro John Carpenter makes his only countdown appearance with arugably his least successful film- The Thing would gain cult status only upon the advent of home video. Still, not even Halloween?
Star Kurt Russell is another face we'll likely never see again (not even Stargate?), since his most notable roles are in Carpenter classics like Escape From New York and Big Trouble In Little China.

Among a small ensemble are grizzled voice for hire Keith David (Pitch Black, Platoon, They Live)and Wilford Brimley (Cocoon, spokesperson for the ADA, and of course mentor to Stephen Colbert via regular 3AM phone calls).



Click for More...

The Story:

Pretty standard- a collection of scientists (like Brimley) and badass types (like Russell's helicopter pilot and David's...badass black dude?) are stationed at a research base in Antarctica, minding their own business doing science and all, when a krazy Norwegian from nearby crashes his helicopter, blows it up, and starts shooting at a sled dog that was running from him.

He wings one of the scientists during his crazy Norwegian rampage, so the base commander is forced to shoot him. Russell and another guy go to his base, but find only more dead Norwegians, evidence that they had dug something out of the ice, and a horrible, half-human looking burnt corpse.

Naturally, they haul the corpse-thing back to the lab, where Brimley discovers it has familiar organs but is clearly not all human. They put the sled dog in with their own pack, but it quickly turns into a horrifying nightmare monster and sends out tendrils to assimilate the other dogs- Russell breaks out the flamethrower just in time.

Brimley takes some samples or what have you, and discovers that it's some sort of organizism that can consume and imitate any host, on even a cellular level- and very rapidly at that. Realizing that he can no longer trust anyone, he promptly goes nuts and destroys the helicopters and radio equipment before the rest can tie him up in a shack.

After some more chaos and untimely demises (the half-human corpse thing? Totally not dead.), a harrowed half-dozen or so remain. Suspicion falls on Russell, but he holds the rest at bay with a stick of live dynamite and a blowtorch in his hands, and devises a blood test to see who's human and who's not once and for all.

The Artistry:

Alien parasite, isolated base- I settled in for an atmospheric, Alien style horror film. And The Thing is certainly that, in part. But it's also a full-on, gross out creature feature, and it boldly announces so 25 minutes in when that stray dog suddenly isn't a dog any more.

That creation, by Stan Winston and all of the subsequent partially-human monsters created by Rob Bottin, spend the film veering wildly across the line between Evil Dead II excessive hilatiry and genuine, Cronenberg-style horror. It makes The Thing a little dicey in tone- especially because none of the cast really has the time to create a character we might care for, with perhaps a couple exceptions.

Those would be of course Keith David's reactionary badassness and Kurt Russell's gritted teeth: Russell gets the lone character beat before the chaos begins as he loses to a computer at chess.

The Thing has a fun visual look, mostly full of flares illuminating the base at night in bright colors, and the score (by Ennio Morricone!) is a neat balance of 80's synth and histronic strings.

But what I liked most was the pod-person nature of the plot- much more the focus of the John W. Campbell, Jr. novella "Who Goes There?" upon which the movie was based. That's where Russell's improvised test comes from- taking a blood sample from each man and testing it with a hot wire- comes from. Since each part of "the thing" is a separate organizism that defends itself, provoking it should get a tell-tale reaction.

In the movie, Russell figures this out when he sees my favorite of the many disgusting images- a severed head sprouting insect-like legs to crawl away.

THE ENDING! SPOILERS!

The test reveals one man to be an impostor, who then monsters out and kills another one before they can flamethrower him. This leaves four standing, though they realize they've forgotten about poor Brimley, locked out in a shack. David stands guard as Russell and the two others go to give him the test- instead they find an empty shack, and a secret tunnel under the floor leading to what looks like and alien craft made from spare helicopter parts.

They see David leave the base, just before the power gives out- the Brimley-monster has destroyed the generator. Accepting that they're never getting out alive, all three take some dynamite to burn the whole place down and prevent the Thing from reaching civilization. This is pretty much what happens, and you'll never guess which of the three survives and makes it out before the explosion!

David returns (he thought he saw Brimley out there, and got lost, allegedly), and he and Russell share a laugh about how they can't possibly trust one another as they wait to freeze to death. The end.

END SPOILERS



Overall: Should It Be Higher, Lower?

Definitely a solid effort, but not something that would make my top 250. It might be the overdone FX, or the lack of any sort of arc to the story, but I can't see revisiting The Thing in the future.

The Legacy:

Coming out two weeks after E.T. and on the same day as Blade Runner, The Thing fared pretty poorly at the box office, and was an afterthought in Carpenter's otherwise winning 80s career. But it found new, cult-status life after coming out on video and DVD. It's even been made into a comic book series and a video game.

The Best Video Of It On YouTube:

Warning: severed-head-related discretion is advised.



Leftover Thoughts:

-Favorite part: Brimley's hilariously prophetic computer, which takes one look at a cellular animation of the Thing and types out things like "PROJECTION: IF INTRUDER ORGANISM REACHES CIVILIZED AREAS... ENTIRED WORLD POPULATION INFECTED 27,000 HOURS FROM FIRST CONTACT," while Wilford sits there with his face at its Brimliest.


Coming Up...

163. Stand By Me

162. The Terminator

161. Amores Perros

Talk about a familiar story: 2009's Oscars had a clear frontrunner for Best Foreign Film in The White Ribbon, and even a potential spoiler in Un Prophete- but in keeping with the wild nature of the category, the voters went with Plan C and gave it to El Secreto De Sus Ojos (The Secret In Their Eyes) instead, the submission from Argentina.

After some initial wavering, it looks like it's made the countdown for a long stay. Let's hop to it!

The Key Players:

Director Juan José Campanella was first nominated for the Foreign Language Oscar for 2001's El Hijo de la Novia, but spent much of the last decade earning his living directing episodes of "House" and "Law & Order: SVU" before returning to make Ojos in his native Argentina.

And I have it on Wikipedian authority that leading man Ricardo Darín is one of the biggest film stars in Argentina- I've only seen him in Nueve Reinas (Nine Queens), a fun con-men caper remade in the states as Criminal.



Click for More...

The Story:

In 1999, a retired justice agent name Benjamín Espósito finds himself obsessed with a case from 1974 in which a 23-year-old woman was raped and killed in her home. He decides to write a novel about it, after discussing it with his former department chief, Irene Hastings, between awkward, lost-love-tension-filled pauses.

Flashback to the seventies, when Irene first came in to be his boss, and his biggest problems were ridiculously large piles of paperwork and an alcoholic partner named Pablo Sandoval. He trades barbs with rival detective Romano, and sets off on the fateful Morales case.

The widower, young Morales himself, is what makes the case so memorable to Benjamín: devastated by his young wife's death, he has several conversations with Benjamín about living an empty life.

Romano beats two lowlifes into false confessions, which an enraged Benjamín quickly exposes, causing Romano to transfer away. The detectives find a real suspect in Isidoro Gomez, a childhood acquaintance of the victim's that Benjamín noticed staring at her real creepy-like in every old photo, but can't locate him for a year: all they can find are some letters to his mother that mention random names and taking the train to the city.

Morales, dedicated to his wife's vengeance, takes to waiting in the train station after work every day, for an entire year. Then finally, Pablo discovers the names in the letters are players from the local soccer team's history- they decide to look for Gomez at upcoming matches, and find him at the fifth one.

Benjamín and Irene manage to cajole Gomez into a confession. He's sentenced to life in prison, and alls well that ends well.

Or not: just a year after that, Gomez is seen clearly unjailed on national tv- he's been released by Romano, now a member of an important government agency employing Gomez as a clandestine enforcer and hitman. What?

The Artistry:

El Secreto De Sus Ojos manages to be several different types of film at once, without getting too caught up in any of them.

A Parable Of Lost Love: Darín and Soledad Villamil, popular Argentian stars that have played romantic interests before, bring such a lived-in, subtle chemistry to both time periods that it's easy to take this angle for granted until the very end of the film. The opening, dreamlike sequence is a haunting image of Villamil running after Darín's train as they're parted, perhaps forever, but the actual scene sneaks up on you. The two leads make the romance compelling in its honest frankness, instead of overdoing it like soap stars.

A Straightforward Procedural: The murder itself ends up being more like a typical "Law & Order" plot than I expected- for some reason I expected a larger, behind-the-scenes machination to be behind it, but it never came. It's the soulful obsession of Morales, and the eventual impact of the case on each character's life that propels the film along- the Morales case is almost a feint to get us to look at the wrong hand.

A Historical Drama: As we'll see in the ending, some important political factors in Argentina's history end up playing a part in how it all adds up- another element that slowly encroaches on the plot, lost in news snippets and casual remarks.

A Rumination On Writing: Darín's struggle with the theme of his novel, and what the case means in the present day is a rare framing device that I appreciate- in a memorable element, he takes to writing snippets of phrases on paper by his nightstand, half-awake. One reads "TEMO" ('I fear'), which he thinks he wrote in a fit of paranoia , before he realizes that he meant to write "TE AMO" ('I love you') all along, spelling out the real reason that time of his life was haunting him.

THE ENDING! SPOILERS!

Pablo is accidentally killed, mistaken for Benjamín when sleeping off a bender at his apartment. When Benjamín finds his partner's body, the only two pictures that he had of himself had been turned facedown: Pablo had intentionally confirmed the gunmen's mistake to save Benjamín's life.

Presumably the vindictive Romano is behind the killing, but since the government at the time was rampant with gestapo killings (as the Peronist right escalted its tactics against rebel leftists), he's virtually untouchable. So Benjamín flees to a remote job in the country, as Irene stays behind (her rich family makes her an unlikely target), tearfully running after his train in a goodbye.

Back in the present, Benjamín (who moved back to the city in 1985 after the Dirty War died down to find Irene married with children) visits Morales in a remote town to show him the finished novel. After a tense discussion, the widower admits that he tracked Gomez down, and shot him dead in the trunk of a car.

Benjamín leaves, but remembers Morales' singular dedication to his wife, and his conviction that life imprisonment, not the death penalty, would be the fitting punishment for Gomez. Benjamín sneaks back to discover that Morales has kept Gomez in a home-made prison cell for 24 years (hence the move to the country), feeding and clothing him, but never once speaking to him.

Aghast, Benjamín leaves, and finally goes to Irene to admit his feelings for her- though they both agree it won't be easy (since she's still married and all), they're finally ready to move on with their lives, together.

END SPOILERS


Overall: Should It Be Higher, Lower?

I imagine, as this gains exposure on DVD and so on, that it will go presently higher on its own, without me having to say so.

The Legacy:

One Oscar, One Goya Award (like the Oscars of Spain!) and thirteen Argintine AMPAS Awards. Otherwise, too soon to tell, go rent it or something.

The Best Video Of It On YouTube:

Hey you know what YouTube isn't big on? Subtitles! But check out this insane shot (I assume trickery of some sort is involved) that goes all the way from a blimp's-eye-view of the futbal stadium to our heroes as they search the stands. The shot actually goes way longer as they chase their man through the stairwells.




Coming Up...

164. The Thing

163. Stand By Me

162. The Terminator