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Walt Disney Pictures
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33.
White FangStarring Ethan Hawke and Klaus Maria Brandauer
Directed by Randal Kleiser
Released: 1991
You
could probably guess that when I was growing up in the 1960s or '70s,
the Jack London adventure novel on which this movie is based would have
been a favourite of mine. It was (along with Savage Sam and Call of the Wild
-- all involving dogs). When this movie came out, I was too old to
go see it in the theater, and had no young children around to use as an
excuse for my own attendance. So I had never seen it, and jumped at the
chance to include it in this year's film festival, where there are no standards.
It's
a Disney movie, both literally and metaphorically; meaning that there
is no subtext that would go over the heads of young viewers. (I know, a
lot of the earlier animated Disney movies -- I never saw the later ones
-- have such subtext, but that's not what "it's a Disney movie" means.)
The novel, as far as I recall (and it's been more than 50 years since I
read it, so I could be wrong) has no subtext either, so it's not like
the movie is a sanitized version of the book. As far as I can recall,
the movie tracks the book pretty well.
In
this film, Ethan Hawke, in his first leading role, plays Jack Conroy,
whose father died after staking a claim in the Klondike. Jack has come
to take up his inheritance. He meets his father's good friend Alex
(Klaus Maria Brandauer), who gets sucked into taking the boy up to the
claim in an area that is remote even by Yukon standards, then gets
sucked into teaching him how to mine for gold. Along the way they
encounter Mia Tuk, or White Fang, a wolf-dog hybrid who has been caught
and trained by local natives who are friends of the affable and
widely-respected Alex.
Though all the lines in the movie are said by
people, the movie is really about White Fang. Not a great movie, maybe; some of the special effects are a little on the hokey side, as when, in a quick cut, a wolf (played by a big dog) appears to bite a log covered in fur. But a great story. You know, there's a reason why all those old novels
are called "classics"; they actually tell great stories, if you can get
past the sometimes dated language. (If we still used the King James Version of the Bible, we'd have no trouble reading Shakespeare.)
Starring: Emily Blunt, Jamie Dornan and Christopher Walken
Directed by: John Patrick Shanley
Released: 2020
So
many movie plots depend on the inability of the characters to communicate
thoughts to other characters. This is one of those. Anthony Reilly
(Jamie Dornan) grew up on the farm next to Rosemary Muldoon (Emily
Blunt). They have loved each other since childhood but he thinks he's
unworthy of her, and she thinks she needs to let him make the decisive
move. Sadly, he is indecisive.
Their
romance, or the lack thereof, is also tied up with the land. Rosemary
owns a strip of land between two gates that give access to Anthony's
family's farm. To tell you how that came to be would be a spoiler, so
... suffice it to say that Anthony's father Tony (Christopher Walken)
sold it to Rosemary's father years before. And Tony has decided to sell
the farm to his nephew in New York, because be believes Anthony will
never marry and thus the farm would eventually pass out of the family, and that would be wrong.
Tony is something of an idiot about this, until Rosemary's mother points
out that the farm doesn't know right from wrong. You would think he
could have figured that out himself.
It's
a rural story, with a rural pace and a lot of rain, but as a romance
it's a great success, both beautiful and engaging. You know before hitting "play" that it will have a happy ending, but getting there keeps you watching
and hoping. It also makes you glad that movie characters are so often unable to communicate thoughts to other characters.
Starring Woody Harrelson and Laura Dern
Directed by Craig Johnson
Released: 2017
Woody Harrelson plays the title character, a garrulous naïf with offbeat opinions about everything, and no filter to stop him sharing them with anyone he encounters. And he encounters a lot of people. He is the guy who will share your table at a restaurant when all the others are available. If you're the only person on a bus, he will sit next to you and force you to converse. No wonder his wife left him: just packed up and moved away without a word.
Now, after many years, he goes to find her. I forget why, and can't be bothered to look this movie up to remind myself why. He locates his ex-wife, who seems to be doing alright, and drags her into his loony effort to be a part of their daughter's life ... the daughter they gave up for adoption 17 years before.
There are some amusing bits in this film, like the scene pictured on the poster art, but not nearly enough to make me ever want to sit through this again. I revolt at the thought of having to listen to this character talk, and talk, and talk. And hearing the idiotic Woody character from "Cheers" in everything Harrelson says is more irritating than I would have thought. That may not be a fair point, but there it is.
Also, the dog dies. You don't see it, but it happens.
Starring Katherine Langford, Charlie Plummer and Hayley Law
Directed by Brian Duffield
Released: 2020
A Tale of Two Movies: It is the best of films, it is the worst of films.
First, the premise is hilarious. Gruesome but funny. Mara (Katherine Langford) is sitting in a boring math class and drops her pencil. When she leans over to get it, the student in front of her explodes like a popped balloon. Blood covers everything like the climax of Carrie. No one knows why it happened. The whole class is taken to the police station and interviewed, tested, interviewed again. No answers are forthcoming.
On the bright side, as a result of this tragedy, Dylan (played by Charlie Plummer) is emboldened to approach Maya, and they begin a relationship that, over the course of the first hour of this movie, will gradually develop into a real romance. Despite the unexplained popping of additional students in the Senior class, Dylan and Maya's relationship is a nicely staged romance manifesting genuine dialogue, natural reactions, and the sort of attitudes that exemplify ordinary people that age. Despite the occasional truly wierd event (Pop!) it feels right.
Eventually the entire senior class is quarantined, and months pass without a spontaneous irruption of a student. People relax. Then there is a sudden spate as a dozen or more students vanish in puffs of blood. There is a panic scene, as the students run aimlessly about. Dylan and Maya are separated in the crowd, and when they are reunited there's a touching scene in the back of the school building. Until Dylan explodes in Maya's face.
And that ends the good part of this movie. The rest of it is dark, and there is nothing fun or romantic about it. It's a high-school version of Leaving Las Vegas. If I were a teenaged boy on a date watching this movie, I would know I wasn't going to be getting lucky that night. The hope and confidence I was feeling until Dylan burst would be gone in a splatter of red dye; it's a real downer. And the ending is crap, managing to be both predictable in gross and irrelevant in detail.
Starring Robert Redford and Brad Pitt
Directed by Tony Scott
Released: 2001
It's Nathan Muir's last day with the CIA. It begins with a phone call from a contact in Hong Kong, telling him to get to his office and read a fax if he wants to know what's going on before "they" do. Muir, played by Robert Redford, learns that a former asset of his, one Tom Bishop, has been captured by the Chinese while attempting to sneak a prisoner out of a Chinese prison. Muir then gets called in to a task force meeting concerned with the incident. The agency is planning to leave Bishop where he is, but first they want to know all they can about Bishop, what he is likely to say before being executed as a spy. Muir keeps information in his head, so he is invited to walk the task force members through his dealings with Bishop.
In flashbacks, we see Bishop, played by Brad Pitt, being recruited by Muir in Viet Nam, then converted to an agency asset in Germany. We see his work in Lebanon, where he develops a relationship that will have consequences later. And we see Bishop, in quick cuts, in Chinese custody. In between all this, we see Muir doing odd things around the CIA offices in Virginia, things that clearly he shouldn't be doing.
This is a taut, tense and elaborate script and the performances of both principal actors does it justice. Redford is superb as Muir, a generation older than Pitt's Bishop, and Pitt is probably playing himself as a mentee of Redford, even this far into his acting career. (Ten years before, he had been directed by Redford in A River Runs Through It, one of his first major movie roles.) It doesn't hurt, either, that both actors have similar coloring and could be father and son, except for Pitt's chipmunk-cheek look.
The supporting actors do excellent jobs as well, particularly Stephen Dillane as Chuck Harker, whose position in the agency makes him the bad guy that Redford's Muir has to outwit. Catherine McCormack as Bishop's Beiruit girlfriend Elizabeth Hadley is suitably enigmatic. Muir thinks she's using Bishop and causes a blow-up between them. When next Bishop knocks on Hadley's door, her expression makes the viewer wonder: Is Muir right? I'm still wondering about that. Plot-wise, it's a great smile.
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Will Penny (Paramount)
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38.
Will PennyStarring Charlton Heston, Joan Hackett and Donald Pleasance
Directed by Tom Gries
Released: 1968
By the time this film was made in the late 1960s, the Western as a movie genre was pretty much on its way out. There were still a few television shows set in the Old West, but the Golden Age of the Western had ended, helped in its passing by the competition from "spaghetti westerns," made overseas on much smaller budgets.
The Westerns that came out of Hollywood featured a set of morals that, by the late 1960s, were being questioned in every aspect of popular culture. This film adheres to the "old school," both in message and style. Good guys are good in every way, bad guys are bad in every way, and the cavalry always arrives in the nick of time.
So it is here. Will Penny, played by Charlton Heston, hires on as a line-rider for a ranching concern. When he gets up to his remote cabin, he finds it occupied by a woman, Mrs Allen (played by Joan Hackett) with a young son. They turn out to have been abandoned there by their guide to Oregon. Penny has not worked out what to do about her presence, with the winter coming on, when he is set upon by a lawless family of itinerant criminals that he had encountered once before. They beat him up, rob him and leave him for dead. He struggles back to the cabin, where he is nursed back to health by Mrs Allen.
You can guess what happens between them, but as required by the Code of the Western (or something), it's all chaste. When the bad guys return on Christmas eve, even they give Mrs Allen two days' thought before she has to choose which of the family's sons will be allowed to rape her. She uses that time well; she and Penny concoct a plan, and as she provokes fighting between the two sons, Penny neutralizes the father, steals the wagon and rides off, intending to get help from the ranch house three days' ride away. (Not much of a plan, but it's about all they can come up with in the circumstances.) Luckily, the metaphorical cavalry is already out there in the hills close by the cabin, in the shape of Blue (Lee Majors, in his first major film role), a cowboy known to Penny. Together they take on the bad guys, manage to smoke them out of the cabin, and exact justice upon the whole family. As that event reaches its climax, the ranch's boss arrives with reinforcements, having been advised by neighbouring ranchers that something is going on up there in the mountains.
As to the outcome of the relationship between Mrs Allen and Penny, I'll let you check out the film yourselves. The scenery is beautiful -- it was filmed in Inyo County, California, which includes both Death Valley and the Sierra Nevada's highest peaks -- and the acting by the principals is better than competent. In fact, were it not for the dated style of acting demanded by the studios in that day and age, and the traditionalist morality demanded by the motion picture industry at the time, I think this could have been a much better film. As it is, it's just pretty good.
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