Review of the Wild Bunch

So, it occurs to me that I forgot to write a review for #80 on AFI's list, The Wild Bunch. I forgot to write the review because the movie sucked. Really sucked.



If I was to say that The Wild Bunch is violent, you'd probably say, "What? A violent Sam Peckinpah movie? Get outta town," in a really sarcastic tone. But no, really, it's violent. I wish I could say the violence was shocking in an artistic way, but it's really not. For one thing, they just didn't understand how to make fake blood in the 70's. It looks awful and subtracts from the visceral power that the violence was intended to inspire.

And yes, the violence was intended as artistic. Sam Peckinpah wanted to shock audiences by presenting images that invoked the Vietnam war, which still broadcast awful things into the homes of Americans every night. It's too bad that, aside from the violence being silly instead of artistic, the plot is also stupid. It basically involves several groups of people trying to shoot each other, successfully and in large numbers.

Rarely in movie history have so many unlikeable characters been collected onscreen. There is seriously nobody for whom to root. Pike Bishop, the film's "protagonist" is the leader of a gang of outlaws in the early 20th Century. He is a cold-blooded asshole who cares little for anything but money. His sidekick is Dutch, a cold-blooded asshole who cares little for anything but money. They meet this Mexican warlord, a cold-blooded asshole who cares little for anything but money. Feel free to repeat this process to gain an accurate discription of every character in the movie. The one exception is an outlaw named Angel who, while being a CBAwCLfABM, has mild concerns about the lawlessness of the Mexican Revolution and its effect on his hometown. As such, he is the moral pinnacle of this film's characters, but it's also worth noting that he murders his ex-girlfriend in a jealous rage during the course of the show.

In short, don't waste your time. Excessive violence may have been a cinematic novelty in the 70's, but it's been done many times more successfully and artistically since.

500 dead Mexicans out of 5000

Review of Saving Private Ryan

The action in Saving Private Ryan begins with the amphibious invasion of Normandy on D-Day in 1944. It is a tremendous, terrifying spectacle that blows your mind, eyeballs and hundreds of GIs out of the water. It is powerful and horrifying. Machine-gun bullets whiz past your ears and kill men struggling in the water. Meat hits the camera. A boy with his guts splashed on the beach screams for his mother. In the end, the Americans exact revenge upon the Germans by murdering them after they've surrendered. It's real, it's bloody, it's all hell. After you watch this scene, you don't want to go to war.




And yet, Saving Private Ryan contains another scene which ruins the effect of the first. At the end of the movie, the Army Rangers sent to find Private Ryan and the Airborne soldiers link up and stage a last-ditch effort to keep the Germans from crossing the only intact bridge left on a river. This too is a powerful scene filled with blood and meaty chunks flying everywhere, but the effect is different. Here, the action makes any red-blooded man wish he could go back in time and kill some Germans.

Why does this happen? I can only assume it's because the later scene is filled with imagery that builds the romance of war. Guys fighting to the end despite all odds, the cinematic nature of the tension built as the advancing armour rumbles and shrieks like some great beast, Captain Miller falling mortally wounded, the return of the released German soldier, all of it was cinematic. Cinematic as opposed to real, like the first battle is. Add some images of fluttering American flags and you have a typical Hollywood-war-is-great-rah-rah-rah picture.



Was this effect intended? If it was intended, then this movie is pretty hypocritical, considering the effect which the first battle inspires in the audience. If I would, I'd like to call your attention to Band of Brothers, HBO's amazing WWII epic about the 101st Airborne Division, Easy Company (Private Ryan's unit, incidentally). As far as I'm concerned, Saving Private Ryan is merely a rehearsal for Band of Brothers. It's made by the same people (Spielberg, Tom Hanks, etc.) It's just better. Why? Because Band of Brothers has the feel of that first scene of Saving Private Ryan and never descends into flag waving and letting flow the Hollywood sap. It's real, and because it stays real, it's more effective. Normal men become heroes not because they gun down Nazis by the thousand, give speeches about freedom and come up with plans so crazy that they might just work. They are heroes because they lived through all war's bullshit so the rest of us didn't have to. When Band of Brothers is over, you want to travel back in time, not to kill Germans, but to share a beer with those paratroopers and thank them.

All that said, despite the hypocrisy, Saving Private Ryan is okay.

4 brothers killed out of 5

Review of The Shawshank Redemption

The Shawshank Redemption is, according to the Internet Movie Database, the best movie of all time. It has stayed in that spot on the IMDb's list for most of the database's life, and I suspect it will be there for years to come. How odd that this movie was an unpopular choice with theatre-goers when it was first released.



I saw this film for the first time in 1994 at the long-gone Paradise Theatre in Saskatoon. In those days the Paradise stayed alive by showing double-features, and as I recall the first feature was Legends of the Fall. Let's say that after that particular monsterpiece, I was in barely a mood to enjoy yet another epic. But Shawshank won me over.

This was the movie that established Morgan Freeman as Hollywood's narrator of choice. After this, producers, being an unimaginative lot, could only think of him when they wanted somebody to talk about penguins or parapelegic boxers.

Also making a familiar appearance in this show is the Stephen King villain. In Shawshank, he appears as Warden Norton and Chief Hadley. The way you can identify a Stephen King villain is that he's a character with no redeeming personality traits whatsoever.

There was something about the dialogue in this show that struck me as being very similar to Titanic. It was a clunkiness that comes from uneducated characters waxing poetic when the screenwriter needs them, but saying really obvious, cheesy things at other moments.

You know, looking back on this review, it looks like I didn't like this show very much. But you know what? I did. I don't think it's the greatest movie ever made, but I still remember how the movie thrilled me when we discover what happened to Andy Dufresne the night he smuggled rope into his cell. While the dialogue may seem cheesy at times, there is enough poetry in it to keep me satisfied. Lastly, the ending is very satisfying.

4 rocks that have no business being in a Maine hayfield out of 5

Review of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

This film marks the second entry on AFI's Top 100 American Movies list for screenwriter William Goldman, the other being All the President's Men. You also might remember him as the guy who did the screenplays for The Princess Bride, Misery, The Ghost and the Darkness, Marathon Man, and a host of other famous movies. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is a great screenplay and it's a great movie too.

The dialogue is witty, Paul Newman and Robert Redford are insufferably charismatic, and the plot is offbeat and fun. Butch and Sundance are two-bit outlaws in a world that is changing. They know they are destined to die bloody and the only thing they can do is choose where. A Superposse is on their trail. Their flight takes them across the American southwest, to New York, and finally to Uruguay. It's a fun adventure that has aged well, except for a bizarre 1970s soundtrack.


I would like to take this opportunity for a digression about the 70's. I once read a screenwriting book by William Goldman entitled “Adventures in the Screen Trade”. Apparently, after BCatSC and AtPM (you figure out the acronyms), Goldman was Hollywood's darling-boy. I may just be engaging in ass-speak, but “Adventures in the Screen Trade” may very well have been the first in a series of recent books written to capitalize on suckers who want to write and sell a screenplay for a million dollars; you know, suckers like me.

Anyway, at the back of the book is included the original screenplay for BCatSC. I read the screenplay before I saw the movie. In some respects, the movie was exactly as I imagined. The obvious exception was the 70's music. In his book, Goldman says he likes the music of the movie, claiming that in many ways, the popular music of today is similar to popular music of the 1900s. I think he's wrong. Nothing, no decade in history was like the 70's. Today, when one views the famous scene in which Butch pedals Etta around on a bicycle, the musical addition of “Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head” inspires laughter. One expects a feather-hatted pimp in a purple suit to strut past them.

What the hell was up with the 70's, anyway? I may have been born in 1976, but my earliest memory is from 1980. I've asked a few members of the previous generation what was up with the 70's and I've received only knowing smiles and evasive answers. The impression I get is that the boomers are embarrassed of the 70's but loved it while it was happening.

From what I understand, the 70's were a time of unprecedented freedom of expression. It was the triumph of the 60's hippie movement. Many view the 70's as Hollywood's golden age. People could truly “do their own thing” and be respected for it. There was an explosion of weirdness in pop culture. Clothing was outrageous. Musicians explored minimalism and trance. Drugs were cool.

All of this shows in the movies of the time. You want to put modern music in a historical western? Cool, man. You want to end your crime thriller on an ambiguous note? Groovy. You want to go to Peru, spend the film's budget on drugs, waste two years editing it and then sober-up naked by the side of a desert highway holding a rock in your left hand? Here's a million dollars.

Freedom of expression is good, right? Ditto with artistic freedom? So why is it that the movies produced in the 70's have, for the most part, aged so poorly? Even Star Wars, a movie that defined the modern blockbuster, has distracting 70's hairstyles. What went wrong?

I blame the corporate mindset. I believe that, as a result of corporate meddling, North Americans have become more conservative since the days of bell bottoms. While it is true that sexism and racism have diminished significantly since those days, or at least gone underground, we seem to have less tolerance for art and expression which is “different”. When we view the 70's through a modern, conformist lens, of course it looks ridiculous.


In the 70's, the director and screenwriter had control of the picture. Nowadays, movies are conceptualized by producers and committees. Very few blockbusters start with a great screenplay. They start in a board room where a bunch of bigwigs decide which nostalgic toy or old television show they should make a movie about. The screenplay comes later, after Hasbro has been consulted as to which characters and action sets they will be manufacturing. Producers tell writers which action sequences they want featured. Dialogue and action are edited according to the standards set by the MPAA so that more kids can attend. It's a soulless way to make a movie and I believe it has limited our artistic tastes as a society.

So which is worse, the off-the-leash, overly-artistic and bizarre filmmaking 70's hits, or the cynical, greedy and formulaic blockbusters of today? Would you rather watch the interminable Dennis Hopper piece of garbage, The Last Movie, or the shitfest that is G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra? You decide.

The issue is too hard for me. It all comes back to William Goldman, who said regarding how movies are made and predictions of their financial success, “Nobody Knows Anything”. All I know is Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is an amusing show.
4 ½ lawmen on your tail out of 5

Review of Silence of the Lambs

This is it, folks. The movie that set the standard for all those crime thrillers about an unlikely cop/detective/federal agent on the trail of a quirky and brutal serial killer. It's the genre that a generation of beginning screenwriters have tried to mimic to make a million dollars. The Silence of the Lambs did it first, and as far as I'm concerned, it did it the best.



Anthony Hopkins in the role of Hannibal Lecter is truly scary in a compelling way. When the movie takes a major digression from the plot to follow his escape attempt, the viewer really doesn't mind. While movies are filming, do actors know they are playing roles that will become icons?

On the opposite end of the spectrum of creepiness is Ted Levine's Buffalo Bill character. He is a gigantic, terrifying moth. He lives in darkness. With the aid of night vision goggles, he sees in the dark. He follows his desires to become a woman, just as a caterpillar becomes a moth, with horrifying result.

I'm glad I watched it.
4 skinned murder victims out of 5

Review of In the Heat of the Night

It's very interesting to think about how films age. Viewed from modern eyes, In the Heat of the Night is nothing special. To many, the primitive methods used by police to solve a murder mystery are cliched from countless detective stories produced since, and are pretty obsolete when compared to the high-tech and far-fetched ways in which murders are solved on CSI. The moralizing around racism in Mississippi is old news: we're modern people and most of us agree that violent lynchings are bad.



However, this was not the case in 1967. Then, America was in the midst of a raging civil rights battle. Songs like "Nigger Hatin' Me" received radio play. To many people, the idea of a black man slapping a white man was truly shocking. It happens in this movie, and it was apparently one of the first times something like that had happened on the big screen. As for the policing, I can imagine the forensic work was, at the time, considered to be quite clever and cutting edge.

But now, it's not. It's all been done countless times and developed in new ways since. While this movie may have done it first, but it's hard not to see it as cliche. During the screening, I told myself repeatedly that it wasn't cliche, it was iconic, but it didn't work. In short, it didn't age very well.

This is not to say I didn't enjoy it on some level. It had some great dialogue, including the very powerful and famous line, "They call me MISTER Tibbs!", which went on to become the title of a sequel. Sidney Poitier was a powerful screen presence. Taken together, all of these things added up to a solid "meh".

2 1/2 drunken rednecks out of 5

Review of Forrest Gump

Back in 1995, my first reaction to Forrest Gump was very unfavourable. You see, I watched it on video after the Academy Awards in which it won best picture. At the time, I REALLY wanted Pulp Fiction to win. I was a rabid fan, and in my young mind any film that competed with my favourite movie had to be utter shit.

My criticisms of the film were quite scathing. I came up with this whole theory about how it is the perfect Dumbass American movie. The soft-hearted and soft-headed Forrest gump blunders through life and succeeds utterly. The message seemed to me to be, "Don't think very hard, follow your heart and you'll succeed." Kindly semi-retardation was being glorified as the ultimate American virtue. Yet, at that time in my life I loved Homer Simpson. Funny, that.



I was fully conscious of my old feelings as I turned on the DVD player, but I was willing to give the movie a chance. I'm glad I did. It turns out that Forrest Gump is a decent show.

I'm not saying that what I thought in 1995 wasn't correct on some level: there is a certain sector of American society that rejects contemplation and introspection, glorifying rushing through life roaring and knocking stuff over. However, I'm no longer certain that this is what Forrest Gump is about. Rather, Forrest's governing trait is selflessness.

Forrest loves those he cares about without concern for appearances and strikes out at those who harm them without fear of physical or social retribution. It makes him fearless. His selflessness is what allows him to float (like the feather at the beginning and end of the movie) from opportunity to opportunity without fear for losing what he has. Near the end of the movie, Forrest addresses this himself: "I don't know if we each have a destiny, or if we're all just floating around accidental-like on a breeze, but I, I think maybe it's both. Maybe both is happening at the same time." Something about this line strikes me not as dumb Americanism, but rather Taoism. Is the ultimate message of Forrest Gump to approach each moment in life with love and without fear?



One symbol in the movie still perplexes me: "Run, Forrest, run!" Running appears everywhere in the film. Forrest runs from rednecks chasing him in a truck. Does this mean that he runs from his problems? No, because he also runs back into the jungle to save fallen soldiers. So he runs to solve his problems? No, because near the end of the movie, after a particularily awful jilt from the love of his life, he runs across America several times and it gets him nowhere. Answers.com is equally unhelpful. In answer to the question "Why was Forrest running?", it says "Because he felt like it." This answer is unsatisfying unless viewed from a Zen perspective.

Again with the Eastern philosophy. Some may accuse me of reading too much into a dumb movie like this. Well, I know enough about screenwriting to say that most scripts are written by brainy people. Even Transformers had hidden moral messages.

So it appears that Forrest Gump is a complicated movie about a simple man. It is definitely worth watching again, although many scenes are marred by some awful product-placements and an overly sappy musical score.
4 Presidential audiences out of 5

Review of All the President's Men

Here is a movie that truly strives for realism. In the dialogue, characters make slip-ups and have to correct themselves. Dramatic camera angles are not used, but rather shots that linger on a single character's face for minutes on end. There is no music for the first 25 minutes of the movie. It's an artistic technique that sets this movie apart and also fills it with tension.



From almost the first scenes, I was sucked into the plot. It is intensely thrilling. And here's the interesting part: nobody dies. Nobody fires any guns. How is that possible in a political thriller? It's all in the tone. Richard Nixon, the film's adversary, is only ever seen on TV. Yet, his menacing presence is felt throughout the entire film. It is not long before Woodward and Bernstien begin to feel their actions shadowed by mysterious adversaries that track their movement and hush witnesses. For most of the movie, the danger is implied.

The ending of this movie is very interesting (no real spoilers ahead, if you know the history). It ends on a down-note, with our heroes embarassed and frightened. They are at the height of the danger to their lives. Nixon has clearly won this battle. They are told they have to persevere to do this thing right and work hard by their boss. The rest of history is then told without dramatic action. It's an ending that is gutsy, if nothing else. Knowing the history, one would expect the film to end with Nixon resigning and the reporters basking in their victory. It is different and refreshing to have the dramatic action end with the reporters losing. Some might find it anticlimactic, but not I.

See this movie. Even if you have no interest in the Watergate cover-up or politics, you will enjoy it.
4 1/2 CRP Directors out of 5

Review of Modern Life

The opening image of Modern Times is a herd of sheep pouring through the gate of an open pen which melds into an image of men rushing to work. I'm not sure if this image was iconic then, but it certainly is now. It is also an icon for the whole movie: a satire of industrial society. Seeing this film, it makes sense that it alarmed many wealthy industrialists and their allies in government, and earned the ire of such men as J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI.

Charlie Chaplin's also iconic Tramp character and his thief girlfriend get jobs, systematically lose them, and waltz in and out of jail more times than you can count. It's all very funny. I also find it interesting that The Tramp, in one scene, is mistaken for a communist and gets in trouble with the authorities. Was this a prophetic vision of things to come, or was Chaplin already getting in trouble for his leftist leanings in the 1930's?

Although films had ceased to be silent many years in the past, Modern Times plays like a silent film, with only sound effects, music and brief snippets of dialogue. The only dialogue spoken is phrases like, "Get back to work!" Regarding the music, I wish I had read about the movie beforehand, because apparently the love theme from the movie became famous later as the song "Smile".



Watching this movie made me think about the 1930's as compared to the 1990's. While life must have surely been harder for people in the 30's, in retrospect, my time as a Gen-Xer in the 90's recession was similar. Jobs were scarce for young people and many found themselves depending on the elder generation for support. Droughts were common. Both eras were followed by a baby boom as the elder generation aged and the newer one took over their jobs.

The comparison is interesting when examining how each generation bore the hardships. In the 30's, throughout all media, including Modern Times, one can see a simple message: "Times are tough, but smile, because things will get better". Compare that with the 90's, when times were easier than the 30's, but still pretty bad (but not for rich people). My generation's culture was saturated with sarcasm, cynicism, disillusion, depression, anger and apathy. If Gen-X 90's culture could speak about life, it would sullenly say, "It's all bullshit anyway." Both cultures valued smiles, but my generation appreciated a sardonic, knowing smile.

I'm not saying one generation handled it better than the other. I'm just saying it's interesting how they coped.

This is, no doubt, a strange digression from the subject of the movie review. Returning, I heartily commend it for its courage in dealing with what must have been painful subjects with humour and smiles. It is fascinating and funny.

4 1/2 cogs in the machine out of 5