Year: 2007
Director: David Silverman
Summary: It takes a wide screen to fully capture Homer Simpson’s stupidity, and The Simpsons Movie does it. In the eagerly-awaited animated feature film based on the hit TV series, Homer must save the world from a catastrophe he himself created.
Times Watched: 1
Continue reading The Simpsons Movie
Year: 2006
Director: Ron Howard
Summary: Based on Dan Brown’s popular and controversial novel, The Da Vinci Code begins with a spectacular murder in the Louvre Museum. All clues point to a covert religious organization that will stop at nothing to protect a secret that threatens to overturn 2,000 years of accepted dogma.
Year: 2000
Director: Robert Zemeckis
Summary: Hanks stars as Chuck Noland, a FedEx systems engineer whose personal and professional life are ruled by the clock. His manic existence abruptly ends when, after a plane crash, he becomes isolated on a remote island – cast away into the most desolate environment imaginable.
Possibly the most recognizable director in the world, Spielberg is certainly one of the best at making blockbuster movies really entertaining. He almost never goes for straight comedy, but his movies almost always have good laughs. Some of his worse movies have been sequels, suggesting he may have a weakness for resting on his laurels, though being okay with sequels gave us Last Crusade. He’s great at casting, not always finding the best actor, but almost always someone who fits the role. And since most of the roles in his movies don’t require significant character depth, it works. And while he’s not generally groundbreaking with camera techniques, he’s not afraid to take on really difficult projects with epic scope or heavy drama. He’s definitely earned his reputation.
The Lost World: Jurassic Park: Dumb, pointless sequel that does a terrible job of building off the first movie. I don’t know how much of that is on Spielberg vs. Michael Crichton, but I’m pretty sure this movie doesn’t need to exist. Love the scene in the field, though.
Grade: F
E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial: I’m most definitely in the minority here, but in general I’m not a fan of movies that glorify children and make adults mean and/or stupid. Perhaps because of this I didn’t find it as moving as everyone else does. Some amusing scenes.
Grade: D-
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: Somewhat enjoyable in the theater, but upon reflection is just really insulting, going for cheap and easy laughs while poorly developing every character. Spielberg’s inability or unwillingness to take control of this project and let George Lucas call all the shots really killed it. Spielberg liked Frank Darabont’s script. Ford liked Darabont’s script. Spielberg was quoted as saying he wanted no CGI. But Lucas likes David Koepp (who is decent, but also wrote Death Becomes Her) and Lucas likes CGI. In fact, this movie is responsible for the phrase “nuking the fridge”, usurping the similarly meaning “jumping the shark” from over thirty years earlier. It was probably never going to be as good as the hype, especially with the decision to cast Shia Lebouf and Sean Connery bowing out, but we’ll never know how good it could have been had Spielberg had full reins.
Grade: C-
Saving Private Ryan: The first half hour is brutal, gutsy filmmaking, which unfortunately activated serious PTSD symptoms for a lot of men who lived through D-Day. For people like me who barely know which end of a gun the bullet comes out, it was refreshing to get a honest depiction of war, even for a little while. The rest of the movie is a drama about Tom Hanks finding this private (Matt Damon) who has lost all his siblings and is being recalled home. It’s fine, but didn’t do much for me, especially with an ending that has Mr. Ryan asking a very poignant question to the audience, but before we can even mull it over, Ryan’s wife answers it for us. Gee, thanks for that.
Grade: C+
Catch Me If You Can: Based on a true story, we have Tom Hanks chasing another person, Leonardo DiCaprio, a young man who has made a career out of forging checks and his identity to stay one step ahead of law enforcement. Not terribly gripping, but a lot of fun. DiCaprio is perfect for this role and he nails it.
Grade: B-
Minority Report: Tom Cruise works for a futuristic law enforcement agency which has the ability to see murders before they happen, then intervene before the perpetrator has a chance to commit the crime. However, the perp still gets prosecuted as if he committed the crime anyway. This is all fine and dandy until Cruise gets seen murdering someone; of course, he can’t imagine he’d ever do so, and before he gets apprehended, goes on the lam, desperate to clear his name. Engaging premise and a lot of fun. Cruise is capable in the role. I wish it were more than just an action movie.
Grade: B-
Jurassic Park: Crichton’s famous book about a dinosaur park gone bad is pretty thrilling with occasional corniness and some plot holes that are easy to ignore considering the ride. Really tense in some parts, and convincing dinosaurs (other than, you know, the non-existent mutant raptors).
Grade: B
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom: Gets kind of a bad rap among the original Indy trilogy, though I hear less and less about that since Crystal Skull came out. Completely lacks depth and character development, but it is a prequel that visits Indiana Jones before he began to have feelings, so it’s not entirely unintentional. Casting his then wife as the heroine (Kate Capshaw) was a bad idea, as her sexy to annoying ratio is quite lopsided compared to Karen Allen, though the script is largely to blame for that as well. But the movie is still fun and has many action-packed scenes, which is kind of the point. Jonathan Ke-Quan does a great job as Short Round, and the special effects work is amazing. The final scene on the bridge is a fantastic example of creative film-making without the help of computers.
Grade: B
Close Encounters of the Third Kind: While I find the movie’s finale a little bit of a letdown, Richard Dreyfuss is simply masterful as the line worker who encounters a UFO and gets drawn into the wilderness to discover the truth. I haven’t seen this movie in about twenty years and I can still vividly remember those tones.
Grade: B
Jaws: While I found this a bit frightening as a kid thanks to the music and the shark, I find this even more haunting as an adult as I have a greater understanding of the isolation and emotional trauma these men experience. Dreyfuss is great again, as is Roy Scheider, but the knockout performance comes from Robert Shaw, who is probably scarier than the shark they’re hunting.
Grade: B+
Lincoln: A truly epic look into Lincoln the man and his motivations to end slavery, only briefly touching on the more famous historic events such as Gettysburg and his assassination. Daniel Day-Lewis is exceptional as Lincoln, and I found myself laughing way more than I thought I would. Watches more like a good history lesson than a good movie, but it’s a really good history lesson.
Grade: B+
Schindler’s List: Based on the life of Oskar Schindler who, while working for the Nazis, secretly rescued a bunch of Jews. One of the most emotionally powerful things I’ve ever seen, which is marred only by a completely fabricated Hollywood feel-good speech by Schindler at the end. Shot entirely in black and white and it works. Superb cast. Ralph Feinnes really stands out as one of the bad guys, and Ben Kingsley and Liam Neeson are great as well. Excellent touch at the end to have people who were personally rescued by Schindler honoring him at his grave.
Grade: A
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: A bit disjointed at times, feeling like they had a bunch of great ideas for scenes and just glued them together. But they work on their individual merits, despite how preposterous most of them are (an underground tomb in Venice!) The camerawork is really excellent, providing (along with John Williams) the thrills an adventure needs. But what really helps this movie is Sean Connery, who plays Indy’s father perfectly, giving significantly more depth to Indy’s character. The opening with River Phoenix as young Indy is unnecessary, but it’s fun enough that it was worth keeping in.
Grade: A+
Raiders of the Lost Ark: The perfect adventure movie for those who like anti-heroes. A simple, coherent plot that quickly assigns good guys and bad guys, but gives the bad guys motivations other than just being bad, and the good guys motivations other than being good. Karen Allen is a perfect love interest for Indy, and John Rhys-Davies is wonderful as his convenient Middle Eastern friend. The only significant fault I can find in this movie (and it applies to Last Crusade as well), is that Indy fails at overcoming the bad guy both times and can only idly stand and watch as their arrogance gets themselves killed. Talk about anti-climactic. But more than making up for it is the duel between Indy and the swordsman, which was Ford’s idea as he had dysentery and couldn’t engage in an elaborate fight scene. A lot of brilliance comes accidentally; Spielberg had the insight to see it when it fell in his lap.
Grade: A+
Other Steven Spielberg Movies You May Have Seen
War of the Worlds
The Terminal
A.I. Artificial Intelligence
Munich
The Adventures of Tintin
Hook
War Horse
Empire of the Sun
The Color Purple
Amistad
The Twilight Zone: The Movie
1941
Always
The Sugarland Express
One thing that Zemeckis really has excelled at in his career is taking chances. He was the first director to make a major movie that had actors acting with cartoon characters. He was the first director to use technology that allowed the same actor to interact with himself as another character in the same shot. As a young director he fired his primary actor who had shot nearly all of his scenes and replaced him. He made a movie where over half of it contains virtually no dialogue. He’s not a great director. He seems unable to elevate a mediocre script, leaving good actors out in the cold. But there’s a few things he’s good at, and he’s very good at them.
Death Becomes Her: Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn compete for Bruce Willis’s love, duking it out Mortal Kombat style as they’ve both consumed immortality treatments that literally makes them survive everything. This should have been good, but the script is really lacking. The special effects are good for the time but even at the age of twelve I was really unimpressed with everything.
Grade: F
What Lies Beneath: Michelle Pfeiffer has been seeing a ghost, so she investigates while her professor husband (Harrison Ford) suffers the consequences. It starts out interesting with some genuinely suspenseful scenes, and then completely derails in the final third.
Grade: D+
Forrest Gump: Tom Hanks is developmentally disabled and fatherless, learning his lessons in life from his mama Sally Field and his best friend Jenny (Robin Wright). Somehow he is able to join the Army in Vietnam, which leads to a number of crazy successes in life as he becomes a table tennis champion, inspires T-shirts, talks to JFK, runs his own shrimp company with the help of Army buddy Gary Sinise, and so on. It’s certainly engaging and the acting performances are top-notch, but as a dramatic story it does little for me. Plus, his relationship with Jenny really starts to make me uncomfortable by the end.
Grade: B-
Who Framed Roger Rabbit: A really cool premise, as the worlds of Hollywood and Toon Town literally meet. The plot is simply a standard detective story, but the jazz comes from real actors engaging with cartoons, completely unheard of 1988. Kathleen Turner does a good job as the sultry Jessica Rabbit, while Bob Hoskins and Christopher Lloyd are capable acting with their toon co-stars. A bit of a novelty these days, but still watchable.
Grade: B-
Contact: Based on Carl Sagan’s story of a girl (Jodie Foster) whose father encourages her scientific spirit and then goes and dies on her, fueling her drive into an all-work, no-play life searching the stars. She discovers what is believed to be plans from an alien species to build a spaceship to go visit them. Politics soon enter the discussion which naturally miffs Foster. More drama than science-fiction, exploring and contrasting Foster’s atheist views to the politicians and other scientists who get to decide whether or not she’ll be allowed to make first contact. Matthew McConaughey is fine but he was miscast as Foster’s lover slash Christian counterpart. Foster is superb and really makes the movie watchable.
Grade: B
Back to the Future Part III: The final movie in the trilogy sees Marty and Doc end up in the Old West, trying to stay alive while figuring out how to get the Delorean to work with 1885 technology. As a western it’s a bit lacking, with an obvious set and a non-authentic atmosphere. As a time travel movie it’s lacking, as the movie focuses mostly on it being a western. However, as a character piece, it’s really quite good. Doc’s character grows by leaps and bounds as he falls in love with a schoolteacher (Mary Steenburgen) who was supposed to die, and Christopher Lloyd hits a home run with his performance. Unfortunately, Marty doesn’t really develop for the second movie in a row, and is there just for comic relief (which Fox is good at). Despite its flaws I can’t help but watch it whenever it’s on thanks to all of the charm. I just wish the ending was more satisfying.
Grade: A-
Back to the Future Part II: The second movie in the series is utterly preposterous, with the primary characters ignoring the obvious several times, making things harder on themselves just to serve the wacky plot, which sees our main characters time travel relentlessly. From a plot perspective, this movie is only here to set up the third movie. There’s no significant character development. However, it’s a hell of a lot of fun thanks to Zemeckis’ and Bob Gale’s vision of the future as well as forcing Marty and Doc to revisit 1955 and run into their own selves from the previous movie. Fox playing four separate characters (including his daughter) is also fun. Zemeckis is a master at exposition. So many times in these movies Doc has to go on a rant, trying to explain the intricacies of time travel to Marty (and the audience), and makes it interesting every time. Christopher Lloyd helps as usual, as he really becomes his character.
Grade: A-
Cast Away: Tom Hanks, a FedEx employee whose life is run by the clock, winds up the sole survivor of a plane crash and finds himself alone on an island without any communication to the civilized world. The movie is bookended by ho-hum drama elements involving Hanks’ relationship with Helen Hunt, but the hour and a half or so that focuses on Hanks’ struggles on the island (and getting off it) is brilliant movie-making. With the only dialogue being Hanks talking to himself (and even that goes away after a while), the movie must rely on Hanks’ acting and Zemeckis’ directing to explore the isolation, fear, and depression that Hanks goes through. They succeed.
Grade: A-
Back to the Future: The hallmark time travel movie (and my favorite movies) sees Michael J. Fox accidentally go back in time and accidentally prevent his parents from hooking up. After seeing this at least a hundred times, I can confidently say that Gale and Zemeckis created as flawless a script as possible. While it’s easily watchable for kids thanks to quotable one-liners, fun music and suspenseful action, there are layers and layers of intricacy weaved in to make it watchable by adults repeatedly. The movie never insults the viewer by overexplaining things, all the while effectively getting buy-in to this world where time travel is possible. Easter Eggs are plenty, and repeated viewings reveal double-meaning in nearly every line of dialogue. Zemeckis somehow manages to weave in incest themes without making it trite or uncomfortable. It also helps that Crispin Glover puts in a dynamite performance as Fox’s father. Despite the amazing scripts, I wonder how successful this would have been with a separate cast. I’ve seen a couple of scenes with Eric Stoltz as Marty McFly, and he just didn’t have the comedic energy that Fox has. Plus, Christopher Lloyd has to the best crazy scientist ever. He’s such a master at subtlety, which makes his over-the-top character work.
Grade: A+
Other Robert Zemeckis Movies You May Have Seen
Flight
A Christmas Carol (2009)
Beowulf
The Polar Express
Romancing the Stone
Used Cars
I wonder what in Spottiswoode’s career tempted someone to give him a Bond movie. He once said this:
The movies I want to make are not people’s priority. Nobody would touch them. They cost a lot of money, and studios no longer finance development, so if I didn’t pay for them myself they wouldn’t happen.
Looking at his ratings on IMDb, it doesn’t look like the movies he makes are anyone’s priority.
Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot: Man, what a piece of shit. I was twelve years old and found this (and Stallone and Getty) obvious and stupid. The movie literally has one joke and it’s in the title. I laughed when I saw the preview. That was the last time. In my life. It’s that bad.
Grade: F
Shoot To Kill: A plot-twisty thriller that really does nothing for me, partly because I don’t particularly care for Tom Berenger or Kirstie Alley, but mostly because I don’t feel the thrills. Even Sidney Poitier seems to be a bit listless.
Grade: F
Turner & Hooch: Tom Hanks is a detective who must adopt a Saint Bernard to help find a murderer. Cue lots of saliva and bad dog jokes. Some genuine sentiment at the end, but everything’s a bit too obvious.
Grade: C-
Other Roger Spottiswoode Movie You May Have Seen
Tomorrow Never Dies
The 6th Day
Air America
The Children of Huang Shi
The Music Man, Andy Griffith Show and Happy Days star has been a very ambitious director and has had no problem getting the chance to direct big actors and big movies. However the movies I’ve seen have not lived up to those expectations. Like Chris Columbus, he seems very capable but not groundbreaking. And every movie I’ve seen has dramatic moments that just don’t ring true to me. I wonder if being famous his whole life has given Howard a different lens on how people really act with each other, or if he just believes that’s what it takes to be successful in Hollywood.
Far and Away:You plunge and then you scrub is the lesson I learned from this movie about an Irish lad (Tom Cruise) who escapes property persecution in his homeland and comes to America and tries to settle down there. I like Nicole Kidman (a daughter of one of the bastards who wants him dead), but Tom Cruise is absolutely hilarious as an Irishman. Colm Meaney has a memorable but albeit short role as a runner of a bare-knuckle boxing club in Boston. Other than that, the story about these two lovebirds from different social classes figuring things out in America is uninspiring and seemingly pointless. For a married couple, Cruise and Kidman don’t have a lot of chemistry on-screen.
Grade: D
The Da Vinci Code: By the numbers recreation of Dan Brown’s novel, it does a pretty good job with following the story but emotionally it’s pretty cold. There’s a couple of tense scenes, but the pacing never matches that of the book. Ian McKellen is the best part.
Grade: C
Willow: A dwarf must protect a special baby from an evil queen in this story by George Lucas (don’t worry, he didn’t write the script). I’m not much into fantasy stuff, but this is fairly entertaining for how over-the-top silly it is. Warwick Davis gives it his all, but Val Kilmer is mostly a pretty face. I saw this when I was eight years old and Joanne Whalley became my first celebrity crush. The game for the Nintendo is much better than the movie.
Grade: C+
Apollo 13: Mostly true to fact recreation of the Apollo 13 disaster and all the close shaves that occurred before they miraculously got back home. Shot well, and Howard does a pretty good job extracting suspense from naturally slow-moving spaceship problems that we ultimately know will be solved. However, he adds a bunch of faux-drama between the shipmates that never existed in reality to create more conflict, and that really gnaws at me. I’m not sure if I’m more upset at Howard than I am at the reality that the public may need fake conflict to enjoy a story about one of the most amazing scientific events in the world’s history. Solid acting all around by the star-studded cast of Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton, Gary Sinise, Ed Harirs and Kevin Bacon.
Grade: B-
Backdraft: A family drama set into the world of the Chicago Fire Department. From what I’ve heard, not completely unrealistic representation of firefighters and actual firefighting, but some liberties are taken as well for drama. Very-well paced and some good special effects make this very watchable. Kurt Russell is entertaining as he often is in this kind of thing.
Grade: B+
Other Ron Howard Movies You May Have Seen
Rush
A Beautiful Mind
Cinderella Man
Frost/Nixon
Parenthood
Cocoon
Ransom
Angels & Demons
The Paper
The Missing
Splash
EdTV
How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000)
The Dilemma
Death By Troggles 