jimbell's film blog - Archive

The Sugarland Express

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The Sugarland Express (1974)

Some critics have said that if The Sugarland Express (1974) had not been Steven Spielberg’s first movie, we would have forgotten about the film long ago. Probably true, but the movie has two other things going for it: It is based on a true story that happened in Texas in 1969, and the three main actors are excellent—not something you’d expect in what would normally be a B movie. The story is simple: A 25-year old poor white woman (Goldie Hawn) will stop at nothing to get her 2-year old son back, including hi-jacking a police car to drive her to Sugarland. Her husband (William Atherton) plays a completely believable “white trash” petty con, and the superb Michael Sacks plays a scared but confident, new but wily, shy but friendly police officer. Thirty years after its initial release, The Sugarland Express also captures some of the ethos of late 60s and early 70s. If the event happened today, the young couple would have been dead in the first 15 minutes.

Posted Wednesday, May 02, 2007 11:53 PM by JimBell | with 0 comments

Peggy Sue Got Married

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Peggy Sue Got Married (1986)

I remember from a viewing a few years ago Peggy Sue Got Married (1986) being a fun movie with 50s rock ‘n roll, and it is, but it is also a bit more serious than I remembered. Peggy Sue (Kathleen Turner) is recently separated from her husband and high school sweetheart (Nicholas Cage), when she goes to a high school reunion, has a heart attack, and time-travels (or is it all in her mind?) back to the crucial month of Grade 12 graduation in her all-American town in 1960. There are lots of funny bits about how someone from 25 years in the future and 25 years older sees her mother and father and the high school scene. But her serious intent is to discourage her sweetheart so that she doesn’t get married to him and then doesn’t get divorced from him. This is difficult to do because she finds him quite attractive even though she knows all the faults he has and will have. This movie was not the straight-forward romp I remembered; it was more complex and less pat, epitomized by a statuesque Kathleen Turner in a Twelfth Grade graduation dress.

Posted Wednesday, May 02, 2007 11:51 PM by JimBell | with 0 comments

Airplane

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Airplane! (1980)

Airplane is a giggle. It is an entertaining spoof of disaster films, specifically Arthur Hailey’s Canadian classic “A Flight Into Danger,” where everyone who had the fish dinner on a flight gets violently sick—including all the flight crew. Who will fly and land the plane? The writers never miss a chance for a gag. Of course the gags and the style are dated. I smiled and occasionally hooted.

Posted Wednesday, May 02, 2007 11:49 PM by JimBell | with 0 comments

The Abyss

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The Abyss (1989)

The Abyss (1989), directed by James Cameron, starts off as an expensive underwater American macho adventure, but gets better and better until its moralistic ending which I liked. An underwater oil rig crew is commandeered, if that is the military word, to investigate a nuclear sub that has gone down suspiciously in the Cayman Trench in the Caribbean. A storm comes up and everything goes wrong. Finally, the creature that has been causing a lot of the trouble intervenes to say what it is doing and what it would like. Although the “special edition” was a bit long, I did not regret watching this movie.

Posted Wednesday, May 02, 2007 11:48 PM by JimBell | with 0 comments

The English Patient

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The English Patient (1996)

Whenever I think of The English Patient, I remember that I never heard of anyone finishing the award-winning novel by Michael Ondantaaje. When I thought of the movie which I saw a few years ago, all I remembered was a beautiful nurse (Juliette Binoche) leaning over a badly burned patient (Ralph Fiennes) somewhere in Italy at the end of World War II. Re-watching revealed a complex, challenging movie. The writer or screen writer has two main challenges. One: he must make us care for the English patient. But the patient is a massively scarred, bed-ridden man with some kind of amnesia. In the increasingly long flashbacks, he is not a particularly lovable man: alone, reticent, handsome, multi-lingual, knotted up inside, with a propensity for staring coldly like a bird of prey. Challenge two: we have to identify with, or feel for, his romance, his great love. But it is with the rather cold wife of one of his acquaintences, lasts a relatively short time, and seems to be based on sex and obsession. But when the English patient finally tells his side of the story, the man who has come to kill him says that he cannot do the deed; the nurse looking after him understands why he wants to die; and we are strangely moved, I think, because the man and his story do not conform to Hollywood or cultural stereotypes. This truly was the love of his life, whether it fits our notions or not. And then you start to realize that the movie is replete with other examples of love—short, tall, thin, fat, happy, sad, short, long, etc. They support the author’s theme: The important maps are not political or military but personal and emotional.

Posted Wednesday, May 02, 2007 11:46 PM by JimBell | with 0 comments

Melvin and Howard

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Melvin and Howard (1980)

Melvin and Howard generally has a place in my top ten movies. It is the story of how multi-millionaire Howard Hughes left $156 million to a magnesium bag packer, milk delivery man, and gas station attendant named Melvin Dummar—or maybe the will was a forgery. Jason Robarts plays a lonely and complex Howard whom Melvin rescues from a desert motorcycle accident. Mary Steenburgen is wonderful as Melvin’s ditzy wife who criticizes him for being an impractical dreamer while she keeps leaving him and supporting herself in strip clubs. Besides the excellent performances, the movie is driven by an earnest desire to give the real Melvin his due, as the movie was shot on-site in Nevada, California, and Utah. Ultimately, this warm, charming, sad, and funny movie is about being working poor in America. It should ring true today. In the 1960s the average CEO of a company earned about 35 times as much as the person on the factory floor; today a CEO earns about 1,000 times as much.

Posted Wednesday, May 02, 2007 11:37 PM by JimBell | with 0 comments

JimBell Blog

The Sugarland Express

Peggy Sue Got Married

Airplane

The Abyss

The English Patient

Melvin and Howard

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