It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) – Movie Review
By Robert L. Jones | November 1, 2006
At the end of his rope: Jimmy Stewart gets a chance to see what the world would look like had he never been born
It Was a Wonderful Life
[xrr rating=5/5]
It’s A Wonderful Life. Starring James Stewart, Donna Reed, Lionel Barrymore, Thomas Mitchell, Henry Travers, Beulah Bondi, Frank Faylen, Ward Bond, Gloria Grahame, Todd Karns, Samuel S. Hinds, and H.B. Warner. Screenplay by Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, and Frank Capra. Additional scenes by Jo Swerling. Based on the short story “The Greatest Gift,” by Philip Van Doren Stern. Directed by Frank Capra. (Liberty Films, 1946, Black and White, 130 minutes.)
What would the Christmas holiday season be like without Frank Capra’s 1946 classic, It’s A Wonderful Life? For millions around the world, watching this inspiring, heartwarming movie starring Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed is as much a part of the Christmas celebration as putting cookies and milk out for Santa Claus, caroling, drinking eggnog, or trimming the tree.
Of the hundreds of movies I’ve seen during the forty-one years I’ve lived so far, there isn’t one I can think of that is so quintessentially American as It’s A Wonderful Life. Part comedy, part melodrama, and part supernatural fantasy, the film recounts the life of an apparently ordinary guy, George Bailey, who keeps getting the short end of the stick when it comes to realizing his extraordinary dreams and plans for the future.
I’ve learned, however, first-hand that professing my love for this film is sure to provoke arguments with individualist libertarians and objectivists. On its face, the message of the film appears to endorse self-sacrifice for the good of others. But I disagree with that interpretation. In fact, I think that the choices made by George Bailey during his life were truly wonderful, embodying a full and proper conception of personal, long-term self-interest.
The movie opens to the voices of George’s loved ones, family and friends who are sending up prayers to God to take care of and watch out for George, who’s fallen on the hardest of hard times on Christmas Eve. George’s bad luck doesn’t look like it’s about to change when he is assigned a guardian angel (“second class”) named Clarence, a benevolent bumbler who hasn’t even “earned his wings.” We then learn what has brought George Bailey to the brink of tragedy as director Capra tells the man’s life story in a long flashback that makes up most of the picture.
Ever since boyhood, George Bailey has been there for others. When he was twelve, he rescued his brother, Harry, from drowning in a pond after he had crashed through the ice while sledding. Later, working as a drugstore delivery boy, he prevented his distraught, drunken boss from accidentally dispensing poison in prescription capsules.
As he grows up, George dreams of bigger things than can be found in the confines of his small town: seeing Europe, becoming a civil engineer. About to head off to tramp through Europe before going to college, he shares with his girlfriend, Mary (Donna Reed), his secret aspirations:
Mary, I know what I’m gonna do tomorrow and the next day, and next year and the year after that. I’m shaking the dust of this crummy little town off my feet and I’m gonna see the world! I’m gonna build things: I’m gonna build airfields. I’m gonna build skyscrapers a hundred stories high! I’m gonna build bridges a mile long!
But at every crucial turn in his life, George’s grandiose dreams are thwarted by the responsibilities of everyday life. As he’s about to set sail, he learns that his father had a fatal stroke. After the funeral, George stays in Bedford Falls to run the Bailey Bros. Building and Loan, the family business that his father and Uncle Billy (Thomas Mitchell) had built up, rather than allow it to slip into the grasp of the family’s avaricious nemesis, Mr. Potter (Lionel Barrymore). Potter is the town’s Scrooge-like magnate, a corrupt, power-lusting slumlord who owns most of the key businesses in Bedford Falls. George puts his dreams on hold while he manages the business—and while he watches his younger brother, Harry, go off to college instead.
Then, rather than jump at the opportunity to invest in the promising plastics industry, George instead goes after his real love, Mary, finally proposing to her. One of the movie’s pivotal scenes occurs on the day of their marriage. Just as they are about to embark on their European honeymoon, fate again steps in: their wedding date is “Black Tuesday,” October 29, 1929—the day of the stock market crash. En route to the train station, George and Mary see the people of Bedford Falls running toward the building and loan. George rushes over to find that Uncle Billy has panicked and shut the doors to depositors, having disbursed all the money on hand. Worse, Mr. Potter telephones and tells George that he will “help” bail out the building and loan by offering its members fifty cents on the dollar for every share.
While everyone is losing his head, George keeps his cool, despite the throng of terrified customers demanding their money. George staves off the building and loan’s collapse not by whining to the crowd to bail him out, but by appealing to their long-term self-interest: by asking them not to sell out their future to Potter.
You’re thinking about this place all wrong, as if I have the money back in the safe. The money’s not here. Well, your money’s in Joe’s house, that’s right next to yours. And the Kennedy house, and Mrs. Maitlin’s house and a hundred others. You’re lending them the money to build, and then they’re going to pay it back to you as best they can….Now, listen to me, I beg of you not to do this thing. If Potter gets a hold of this building and loan, there will never be another decent house built in this town…. Joe, you had one of those Potter houses, didn’t you? Well, have you forgotten, have you forgotten what he charged you for that broken down shack? Here, Ed, remember last year, when things weren’t going so well, you couldn’t make your payments? Well, you didn’t lose your house, did you? Do you think Potter would’ve let you keep it? Can’t you understand what’s happening here? Potter isn’t selling, he’s buying! And why? Because we’re panicking and he’s not…. Now, we can get through this thing all right, we’ve got to stick together, though. We’ve got to have faith in each other.
I once argued with a friend about that scene, maintaining that George and Mary did the right thing by using their $2,000 honeymoon nest egg to help their depositors weather the storm. But all my friend could see in that scene—indeed, in the whole movie—was altruism. “One of the very first lines in that movie,” he told me, “is ‘he never thinks of himself’!”
But was that true? Consider what would have happened had George and Mary gone on their honeymoon instead of bailing out their building and loan. Yes, they would have had an enjoyable, relaxing couple of months in Europe; but what would they have come home to? The business that George’s father had sweat blood to create and keep afloat would have gone bankrupt. Not only would George and Mary have had no source of income, but their depositors—family, friends, loved ones—would have seen their life savings evaporate. The housing development George had built would have fallen into Potter’s hands.
For George, the choice was between short-term pleasure and long-term priorities. Did he choose irrationally?
What makes It’s A Wonderful Life work so well is that we get to see a different, less readily apparent kind of heroism in George Bailey. Sure, it’s easy to notice and admire the swashbuckling valor of a Scarlet Pimpernel or the “damn the torpedoes” military bravery of a John Wayne. But the real world doesn’t always present opportunities for obvious and flamboyant heroism. More often than not, it presents instead tough value choices that reveal an individual’s true priorities—and his true character.
It’s A Wonderful Life is a testament to the power of free will when the going gets tough. In every instance when George faces adversities, he could easily make the easy choice, opting for the fleeting promise of instant gratification. But instead, he consistently makes the harder decision to delay immediate pleasure in order to achieve or preserve his larger, lasting, most profound values.
Today, most people watching the scenes in the building and loan’s offices probably cannot quite grasp the bold, life-changing message on the banner that hangs there: “Own Your Own Home.” But I remember as a kid talking with my father about what it was like for him growing up in a Depression-era coal mining town in West Virginia. “You had to have at least a fifty percent down payment to buy a home in those days,” he told me. “If you were poor, you had to rent.” More than any other movie I’ve seen, It’s A Wonderful Life makes real the enormous benefits of the credit revolution, a tribute to “man’s faith in man.”
To Frank Capra, it was men like George Bailey who helped lift the working class into the middle class. Capra considered this film his personal favorite, and put into it a lot of his own experiences as a first-generation immigrant from Sicily. It’s A Wonderful Life is his love letter to the American Dream.
What makes the movie so credible, and Jimmy Stewart so believable as George Bailey, is that he and Capra had both faced those tough choices just months before it was shot. It’s A Wonderful Life was the first movie they worked on after World War II. Shortly after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Stewart joined the U.S. Army Air Force and served as a decorated bomber pilot. Capra spent most of the war shooting the Why We Fight series of propaganda films that proved so crucial to the Allied war effort. Both men could easily have avoided service: Capra was too old when the war began, and Stewart flunked his first physical, being too thin for service. But they put aside the glamorous lifestyle and money Hollywood afforded them for the higher purpose of defending America and freedom. I only wish that such values were held in higher esteem by Americans now, in supporting the war effort against the terrorist threat. Today, we seem less eager to make the kind of hard choices that the men and women of Capra’s and Stewart’s generation did.
The movie’s famous climax takes place on Christmas Eve. Bedford Falls awaits the return of its hometown hero—George’s brother, Harry Bailey (Todd Karns). As a Navy fighter pilot, Harry saved a transport ship full of American troops by shooting down a Japanese torpedo bomber. However, a few hours before his arrival back home, the building and loan comes up short $8,000. Uncle Billy has absent-mindedly mislaid the money, and now, with the bank examiner and police breathing down his neck, the distraught George sees his entire life coming apart. After fighting Potter all his life, he’s reduced to pleading before him, begging to borrow the cash to rescue the building and loan. His only collateral is $500 equity in a life insurance policy. The smirking Potter mocks him, saying, “Why, George Bailey, you’re worth more dead than alive!”
George soon finds himself standing alone in the blustery snow atop a bridge, weeping in drunken desperation, thinking about jumping into the icy rapids below.
At that very moment, guardian angel Clarence Oddbody (Henry Travers) leaps into the river himself, giving George the opportunity to let his inherent goodness emerge once more. George rescues Clarence, then slowly learns the incredible truth: that the old man is an angel sent to protect him.
But still believing that his life has been a failure, he informs the eccentric Clarence that he’s wasting his time. “I wish I’d never been born,” George mumbles bitterly.
The words inspire Clarence to grant George his wish. In the film’s closing moments, he gives the man a shocking tour of what Bedford Falls would have been like if George Bailey had never existed.
The housing subdivision that George envisioned is never built; it becomes “Potter’s Field,” a graveyard for paupers. The wife of his cabbie friend, Ernie (Frank Faylen), leaves him because Ernie wasted his money paying rent for one of Potter’s tenements, instead of investing in his own home. Deprived of the chance to lead a productive life with the building and loan, eccentric Uncle Billy is eventually committed to an insane asylum. George’s beloved Mary remains a spinster; their children are never born. And Bedford Falls itself—a small, thriving American community right out of a Norman Rockwell illustration—deteriorates into “Pottersville,” a sleazy town full of bars, strip joints, and pawn shops.
Most devastating to George, Clarence leads him to his brother Harry’s gravestone in Potter’s Field.
“You’re brother, Harry Bailey, broke through the ice, and drowned at the age of nine,” he informs George.
“That’s a lie!” George protests. “Harry Bailey went to war! He got the Congressional Medal of Honor! He saved the lives of every man on that transport!”
“Every man on that transport died,” Clarence corrects him. “Harry wasn’t there to save them, because you weren’t there to save Harry.… You see, George, you really had a wonderful life. Don’t you see what a mistake it would be to throw it away?”
“You have been given a great gift,” Clarence adds. “A chance to see what the world would be like without you.”
As I do every Christmas, this year I’ll again be watching It’s A Wonderful Life with my family. I’ll once more share with my loved ones Frank Capra’s timeless tale of a man who always remained loyal to his highest and dearest values, and who ennobled the lives of everyone he touched through his common sense, farsighted thinking, and uncommon integrity.
To those who might dismiss George’s story as not the stuff of epic heroism, I can only repeat the director’s own words. Decades after It’s a Wonderful Life first appeared, Frank Capra said: “The importance of the individual is the theme that it tells. That no man is a failure, that every man has something to do with his life. If he’s born, he’s born to do something.”
He added: “To some of us, all that meets the eye is larger than life, including life itself. Who can match the wonder of it?”
Robert L. Jones is a photojournalist living and working in Minnesota. His work has appeared in Black & White Magazine, Entrepreneur, Hoy! New York, the New York Post, RCA Victor (Japan), Scene in San Antonio, Spirit Magazine (Canada), Top Producer, and the Trenton Times. Mr. Jones is a past entertainment editor of The New Individualist.
Topics: Classic Movies, Comedies, Dramas, Fantasy Movies, Melodramas, Movie Reviews |
Flags of Our Fathers (2006) – Movie Review
By Robert L. Jones | October 21, 2006
Joe Rosenthal's immortal photo of the second Iwo Jima flag raising in 1945
Almost Desecration
[xrr rating=3/5]
Flags of Our Fathers. Starring Ryan Phillippe, Jesse Bradford, Adam Beach, John Benjamin Hickey, John Slattery, Barry Pepper, Jamie Bell, Paul Walker, Robert Patrick, Neal McDonough, Melanie Lynskey. Screenplay by William Broyles, Jr., and Paul Haggis. Based on the book by James Bradley with Ron Powers. Directed by Clint Eastwood. (Warner Bros., DreamWorks Pictures, 2006, color, 132 minutes. MPAA rating: R
Clint Eastwood is arguably our greatest living motion picture director. Thirty-five years after his directorial debut in the Hitchcock homage Play Misty for Me (1971), the silent, gritty actor who learned his filmmaking craft at the feet of such masters as Sergio Leone and Don Siegel has produced a body of work sweeping in variety of subject matter, yet singular in its artistic vision. While many of his contemporaries have slipped in critical esteem—most notably Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese—the two-time Oscar-winning director of Million Dollar Baby (2004) and Unforgiven (1992) has only improved with age.
Until now. In his latest cinematic offering, Eastwood misses the mark with this loose, relentlessly dark, and ultimately cynical adaptation of James Bradley’s book of the same name.
The book was a tribute to the six Marines (one of them his father, John “Doc” Bradley) who raised Old Glory atop Mount Suribachi on the Japanese volcanic island of Iwo Jima, on February 23, 1945. Bradley’s work chronicles the life stories of these six—three who survived the carnage that claimed almost 7,000 American lives: John Bradley, Ira Hayes, and Rene Gagnon; plus the three who perished: Franklin Sousley, Harlon Block, and Mike Strank. Of the survivors, none considered himself heroic for raising the flag or even for his deeds in combat. John Bradley shunned talk about the war, and it was only after his passing that son James found a shoebox in the family’s attic containing mementos, most notably a Navy Cross. “Doc” Bradley, a corpsman (Navy lingo for “medic”), had resuscitated a wounded Marine during a fierce firefight while his own body was ripped by Japanese shrapnel. Yet it was not for bravery that Bradley and his comrades were immortalized after the war, but rather for their chance appearance in Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal’s iconic image—perhaps the most recognizable photograph in history, taken on the fifth day of the bloodiest battle of World War II.
Their individual achievements, identity, and dignity eventually became subsumed in the aura of the legend created by “The Photo.” Through their stories, Bradley’s exhaustively researched book gently prods the reader to consider the true nature of heroism. He pens a moving historical account, shedding light on the real lives of six individuals who rose to greatness despite their flaws and despite history’s tendency to transform them into anonymous symbols of heroic virtue.
It’s a powerful message which, sadly, gets mangled in Eastwood’s overreaching screen adaptation. Although many of the elements of Bradley’s account make it onscreen, in Eastwood’s hands Flags of Our Fathers becomes a documelodrama—a ghastly tragedy that subverts the humanity of Bradley’s account, becoming an overwrought portrait of the three surviving flag-raisers as victims.
To be sure, an interesting portrait it is—a story that promises to grab you by the heart and never let go. After Rosenthal’s photo blazes across the front pages of America’s newspapers, Bradley, Gagnon, and Hayes are whisked up by a cynical public relations machine to shill war bonds to a war-weary America. Though taking up only sixteen of the book’s 382 pages, the war bond drive comprises the bulk of the film’s plot and onscreen action.
The book treats the “Mighty 7th” War Loan bond drive ambivalently, though mostly positively. The drive raised over $26.3 billion from American individuals, families, and businesses—almost half of the 1946 fiscal year federal budget of $56 billion—thus making it possible to rearm the military to force Japan’s defeat in the war’s final months. “When I spoke with a Treasury Department source by telephone to confirm these figures,” Bradley writes, “the official marveled over the size and accomplishments of the Mighty 7th. He fell silent for a moment as he shuffled some papers on his desk. Then he said, simply: ‘We were one then.’” Indeed, without victory at Iwo Jima and the funds raised by the bond drive, the second most recognizable WWII photo—Alfred Eisenstaedt’s August 15, 1945 shot of a returning sailor planting a big, juicy kiss on a nurse in Times Square on VJ Day—might never have been taken.
But Eastwood fixates on the bond drive, taking its highs and lows to distill a potent concoction of pure misery. His account depicts the men’s whirlwind, whistle-stop tour of America’s metropolises as a slick, gaudy sideshow run by contemptuous PR men. It’s a chronicle of exploiting the flag-raisers by having them climb atop a papier-mâché Mount Suribachi to raise the red, white, and blue—of tastelessly serving ice cream molded in the shape of the raising—of glad-handing businessmen and politicians who seek to use the men for their own profit.
Marine Private Ira Hayes becomes the movie’s conscience during all the ballyhoo. “I think this whole goddamn thing is a farce, if you ask me,” he mutters. Yet the book version gives little such evidence of Hayes’s revulsion. In one scene from the book, a politician introduces Hayes (a Pima American Indian) as “the only man here who can claim to be a real American.” In the film version, actor Adam Beach reacts mostly silently and stoically. Perhaps Eastwood felt that Hayes’s reaction in real life, in which he strode up to the microphone and exclaimed, “I’m an Indian and I’m damn proud of it,” would have undermined his effort to portray Hayes as a hapless victim of constant racial slurs.
The look and feel of the movie also serve to evince Eastwood’s dark artistic agenda. A pall of foreboding darkness permeates not only the grueling battle scenes but even the movie’s happier moments (e.g., coming back home to family, or Bradley marrying his childhood sweetheart), rendering them at best bittersweet. Director of photography Tom Stern filmed Flags of Our Fathers almost monochromatically, in swathes of rich cobalt blue, muting the other hues of the spectrum in the color timing.
The movie’s chief flaw is in its confused narrative structure, told mostly by overusing flashbacks. Eastwood and editor Joel Cox used flashback montages to great effect in 1995’s The Bridges of Madison County, but they don’t quite pull it off here. As a viewer, I felt like a ping-pong ball paddled between the bond rallies and the battle scenes; by the middle of the film, I could already anticipate that a newspaper photographer’s blinding flashbulb at a stadium appearance would cut right to a nighttime flare or exploding ordnance as one of the three soldiers relived the hell of war.
Although Eastwood captures the gory reality of the battle scenes, he never offers the viewer the reason for capturing Iwo Jima, or details of the genuinely heroic exploits of the twenty-two Marines and five sailors who were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor (the most given in any single battle in the history of American warfare). Furthermore, even after more than two hours, the viewer never really gets to know as individuals Bradley (Ryan Phillippe) or Gagnon (Jesse Bradford), not to mention the three flag-raisers who died.
The only thing that resonated with me at all was Adam Beach’s moving performance as Ira Hayes. It’s a tragic story of alcoholic despair and guilt that so many fellow Marines died while he was spared, ending with his loss of dignity and untimely death. Yet Hayes’s story is poignant only as a vignette within an otherwise two-dimensional film and deserved fuller development, along the lines of Eastwood’s biopic of saxophonist Charlie Parker, Bird (1988).
James Bradley closes his book by conveying great respect for his father’s modest request to posterity:
After spending five years researching their lives, the boys certainly seem like heroes to me. I admit it.But I must defer to my father…. I will take my dad’s word for it: Mike, Harlon, Franklin, Ira, Rene, and Doc, the men of Easy Company—they just did what anybody would have done, and they were not heroes
Not heroes.
They were boys of common virtue. Called to duty. Brothers and sons. Friends and neighbors. And fathers. It’s as simple as that.
Anyone who had a friend or loved one who fought in World War II recognizes this modesty as a hallmark of that generation. My adopted godfather, Nick, a crusty old Marine who served in Guadalcanal, told me a thousand war stories, most of which involved goofing off with dames and alcohol, hitching rides back home on furlough, reminiscing about buddies who never made it back, playing practical jokes on each other. He never spoke about combat, though.
Nick was a real-life hero to me. I have no idea what he did to earn a chestful of ribbons, and I never asked him, because I figured that if he ever wanted me to know, he’d tell me. But he never did. And it never really mattered, because I learned from him that real heroes don’t blow their own horn.
Eastwood’s version of their story is ultimately a deconstruction of their heroism. He basically writes off the heroic with a relativistic cliché—“Everyone likes things nice and simple—good and evil, heroes and villains”—and ends with a bitter lament: “Maybe there is no such thing as heroes.” Even Sergeant Sefton, Billy Wilder’s cynic extraordinaire in the 1953 film Stalag 17, could become the hero with a heart of gold; but in Flags of Our Fathers, Eastwood performs a sort of reverse alchemy, chucking out gold nuggets while panning for mud.
If Eastwood’s aspirations were merely artistic, I’d regard Flags of Our Fathersas a flawed classic. But it’s worse than that, because he has an agenda. He subverts the truth of these individuals’ stories to craft a political message of exploitation. In doing so, Eastwood transforms Bradley, Gagnon, and Hayes into a sotto voce symbolic rebuke for the “Mission Accomplished” banner aboard the U.S.S. Lincoln aircraft carrier in 2003, when former Texas Air National Guard fighter pilot and current president George W. Bush co-piloted a Navy SB-3 Viking to mark victory in the Iraq war. Sure, I thought Bush was undignified in doing that, because although he had never served in combat a day in his life, he cast himself as some kind of returning war hero. The credit for that victory rightfully should have gone to those brave warriors who actually stood in harm’s way.
That said, I found it highly ironic that despite Eastwood’s strident crowing against the (mostly imaginary) exploitation of Bradley, Gagnon, and Hayes, he himself, having an ideological axe to grind, would exploit and trivialize these heroes over sixty years later.
Unlike in Unforgiven, there is neither riveting drama nor stellar acting (with the exception of Beach) evident in Flags of Our Fathers to allow it to withstand the test of time. By belittling the heroism of its subjects, this flick will more than likely be regarded as one of Clint Eastwood’s minor works, alongside movies like Blood Work (2002) and True Crime (1999).
Robert L. Jones is a photojournalist living and working in Minnesota. His work has appeared in Black & White Magazine, Entrepreneur, Hoy! New York, the New York Post, RCA Victor (Japan), Scene in San Antonio, Spirit Magazine (Canada), Top Producer, and the Trenton Times. Mr. Jones is a past entertainment editor of The New Individualist.
Topics: Docudramas, Dramas, Movie Reviews, War Movies |
Gridiron Gang (2006) – Movie Review
By Robert L. Jones | September 16, 2006
Like a Rock: Dwayne Johnson inspires juvenile delinquents to disciplined excellence in "Gridiron Gang"
“The Rock” of Gibraltar
[xrr rating=3.5/5]
Gridiron Gang. Starring Dwayne Johnson, Xzibit, L. Scott Caldwell, Leon Rippy, Kevin Dunn, Jade Yorker, David V. Thomas, Setu Taase, Mo, and, James Earl. Screenplay by Jeff Maguire. Based on the television documentary “Gridiron Gang,” by Jac Flanders. Directed by Phil Joanou. (Columbia Pictures/Original Film, 2006, Color, 120 minutes. MPAA Rating: PG-13)
Who really wants to see another feel-good movie about a tough educator who takes on both the most violent juvenile delinquents and “the system,” raising them from the abyss of failure and imprisonment to success they wouldn’t even have dared dream of only months before? Do we really need another formulaic sports flick, “based on a true story,” about a coach taking his rag-tag team of underdogs all the way to the city championship?
You bet we do!
In what’s being touted as Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s dramatic debut, Gridiron Gang showcases the former professional wrestler’s physical prowess and emerging acting chops as tough-as-nails juvenile detention officer Sean Porter. Frustrated by the seventy-five per-cent recidivism rate of the teenage felons in his charge, Porter sees that the vicious circle of violence, gang activity and growing up without fathers has doomed them to wasted lives lived behind bars. Porter keeps sending one troubled kid in particular, Roger (Michael J. Pagan), to the hole for punishment.
“Where’re you gonna be in four years?” Porter grills him.
“In jail,” the recalcitrant youth answers, sulkingly.
“No! You’re going to be dead!”
Sure enough, a week later, on release, even though he’s trying to go straight, Roger is gunned down in a drive-by shooting while hanging out with his old gang members. A week later, Roger’s brother Willie (Jade Yorker) winds up at the same juvenile reformatory, Camp Kilpatrick in Los Angeles County, when he guns down his mother’s abusive live-in boyfriend.
One night, driving home from work, Porter spots a group of kids playing football under the lights and gets a dose of inspiration: As a last-ditch effort to try to turn around the presumably unsalvageable lives of Camp Kilpatrick’s murderers, rapists and carjackers, Porter launches a football program.
Seeking to replace the dangerous and self-destructive gang lifestyle with something constructive and positive, Porter cajoles many of Camp Kilpatrick’s self-described toughest youths to belong to the Mustang team, where nobody gets a free ride, and membership has to be earned. Attempting to convince the skeptical administration to fund his team, Porter reminds them, “these kids have never worked hard for anything in their lives.” Once his kids amble onto the practice field, they learn that being tough is more than bullying and posturing, but requires discipline, commitment, and self-restraint.
What impressed me most were the sequences in which Porter builds up the team, drilling them through tough workouts and scrimmages, testing their endurance, and, for the first time in their lives, forging their characters. As with Spencer Tracy’s Father Flanagan in the 1938 classic Boy’s Town, Porter operates on the premise that his boys are not inherently bad. “You are somebody,” he tells them, “and are worthy of something.” But attempts to inspire his team go beyond mere pep talks; Porter instills in them the lesson that true self-esteem can only be gained through achievement, not merely by building up their egos with false praise. “It’s a whole new world out there when you earn things,” he reminds them.
Of course, with Coach Porter being the first man in their lives to believe in and be a father figure to them, fills them with a lot of false expectations when they arrive to their first game. Despite a couple good tackles early on, the Mustangs get a rude awakening once their opponents gather steam. After getting stomped for a 38-0 loss, not only do many on the team start questioning whether the football program is worth it, but so do some of the administration members at Camp Kilpatrick.
“We wanted to create self-esteem, but it was just the opposite,” one of them says to Porter, lamentingly. “These kids can’t handle that kind of disappointment. We have to pull the plug.”
But just as everyone is willing to throw in the towel, Porter finds that one of his players, Junior (Setu Taase), learned that self-esteem is more than immediate gratification, but requires diligent effort, even in the face of crushing defeat. Junior convinces the team why they must not give up, because they’ve already failed at everything else in life. “It’s like I told you, Coach,” he informs Porter, “we’re tired of being losers.”
The plot culminates with the Mustangs improving their playing, and fighting their way to the playoffs. While the action on field is shot a little too claustrophobically by using telephoto lenses, the movie as a whole doesn’t suffer much. Trevor Rabin (of Yes fame) provides an emotionally rousing soundtrack that carries the film nicely. The Rock really holds this movie together with a strong performance as Coach Porter. As a former University of Miami football standout, he brings credibility and conviction to his role. While he’s come a long way from his “Layeth the Smacketh Down” WWF days, The Rock’s not exactly as accomplished and subtle an actor like, say, Johnny Depp. But, the kids in this movie don’t need understatement and nuance—they need sturdy and straightforward. Think Lee Marvin’s Major Reisman from The Dirty Dozen crossed with Glenn Ford’s Mr. Dadier in Blackboard Jungle.
In the genre of tough educators who turns around troubled inner-city youths lives, it doesn’t quite rise to the level of Morgan Freeman’s breakthrough performance in Lean On Me (1989) or Sidney Poitier in To Sir, With Love (1967). Neither does it quite belong in the same league with other great sports flicks about underdog teams who go all the way to the top, like Hoosiers (1986) or Friday Night Lights (2004). But, as a movie which straddles both genres, it really gels, and will lift the spirits of most viewers.
Sure, Gridiron Gang is a formulaic film. But what makes Gridiron Gang such an enjoyable and moving watch is the example of how just one man, Sean Porter, was able to turn around the recidivism rate at Camp Kilpatrick by instilling his players with pride and faith in themselves, that they are not born criminals, but possess the free will to make productive lives for themselves. No excuses self-esteem requires a formula, too, and Gridiron Gang shows how it’s done.
Robert L. Jones is a photojournalist living and working in Minnesota. His work has appeared in Black & White Magazine, Entrepreneur, Hoy! New York, the New York Post, RCA Victor (Japan), Scene in San Antonio, Spirit Magazine (Canada), Top Producer, and the Trenton Times. Mr. Jones is a past entertainment editor of The New Individualist.
Topics: Biopics, Dramas, Movie Reviews, Sports Movies |
A Scanner Darkly (2006) – Movie Review
By Robert L. Jones | July 28, 2006
Why is Keanu Reeves so down? Is it his usual low-key acting? Or a conspiracy?
Just Say “Maybe”
[xrr rating=3/5]
A Scanner Darkly. Starring Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson, Rory Cochrane, Winona Ryder. Based on the novel by Philip K. Dick. Written and directed by Richard Linklater. (Warner Independent, 2006, Color, 100 minutes. MPAA Rating: R.)
Director Richard Linklater (Slackers, School of Rock) has brought to the screen a faithful adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s 1997 sci-fi novel A Scanner Darkly, a cautionary tale about drug addiction and the all-too-real “War on Drugs.”
This film’s predecessors were big-budget action movies such as Minority Report (2002), Blade Runner (1982) and Total Recall (1990)—the latter two based, respectively, on Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and his short story “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale.” By contrast, A Scanner Darkly is an independent production with more intimate dialogue, locales, and situations, as well as a polished ensemble cast.
Set in Orange County, California, seven years in the future, the plot revolves around Keanu Reeves’s character, Agent Fred, a local narcotics officer. He’s assigned to gain the confidence of a passel of burnouts in order to find the source for the highly addictive “Substance D,” which is ravaging the brains of about twenty percent of the population. As Robert Downey Jr.’s character puts it, “Either you’re on it, or you haven’t tried it.”
Inside police headquarters, Agent Fred dons a holographic “scramble suit,” an undulating, visage-changing second skin that protects his anonymity. Out on the streets, he uses the suit to take on his workaday persona, Bob Arctor, a loser who has become an addict in order to avoid detection by the stoner housemates whom he is investigating. Although critics savage Keanu Reeves’s acting, you can’t deny that he has striking screen presence, something that often eludes more talented thespians. Here he gives one of his more convincing performances—ironically, by playing someone who’s heavily sedated most of the time.
Anyone who’s ever tried drugs will instantly recognize the bizarre logic of doper group dynamics. Woody Harrelson plays Ernie Luckman, a mind-expanding hippie who relates to everyday life through Beatles lyrics; Winona Ryder is Bob’s attractive girlfriend Donna, sexually frigid because her vascular system is constantly constricted by cocaine; Robert Downey, Jr. gives a nuanced performance as Jim Barris, a manipulative Iago who mouths pseudo-scientific doubletalk; and Rory Cochrane’s paranoiac Charles Freck suffers harrowing hallucinations of aphids swarming over his body—images that make Ray Milland’s DTs in The Lost Weekend seem like the paragon of sobriety.
Identity, reality, and hallucinations tumble over one another in a visual kaleidoscope, bits of which undoubtedly originated in the novelist’s own experiences with drug addiction and suicide attempts. In the novel, Freck strategically places a copy of The Fountainhead near his body prior to a suicide attempt in order to “prove he had been a misunderstood superman rejected by the masses and so, in a sense, murdered by their scorn.” A version of this scene survives in the film. This shouldn’t be perceived as a tribute to Ayn Rand, though: Dick didn’t sympathize in the least with her vision of a society of heroic, productive achievers. In a 1978 interview he commented, “I’m with the little man. I wouldn’t be with the ‘superman’ characters for all the money in the world. You know, the characters in Ayn Rand and [Robert] Heinlein who have such a contempt for everybody. Because one day that little man is gonna rise up and punch the superman out and I want to be there when it happens.”
Well, in this tale he has certainly given us little men aplenty.
A Scanner Darkly does present a vaguely libertarian argument about the threats to civil liberties from criminalizing drug use, and envisages a future in which the government exploits the War On Terror as a pretext to employ electronic surveillance of homes and public places in order to nab users and dealers. However, I doubt that this film’s relentlessly bleak portrait of drug addiction will win it many fans from among those single-issue libertarians who naïvely believe that legalization will cure a host of social ills. Apart from a couple of outrageous pothead scenes worthy of an old Cheech and Chong flick, the movie captures starkly the vicious circles in which addicts move—a world where the main focus is scoring the next fix, and the ultimate result is loss of identity in slavish drug dependency.
Yet, while the movie’s moral center remains intact, Linklater’s directorial approach doesn’t exactly make for the most riveting cinema. To re-create for the viewer the drug addict’s ambiguous, constantly shifting state of mind, visual effects director Richard Gordoa filmed in the animation process of Rotoscoping—a trippy, graphically seductive imaging technique that layers painted animation over actual footage of the actors. Although many movies pair dramatic images with a largely nonsensical plots—I think of David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997) and Mulholland Drive (2001)—I felt that without the Rotoscoping, A Scanner Darkly would be just as mundane as its aimless subjects.
That visual effect just doesn’t elevate its fairly threadbare story line, and the film never fully overcomes its gimmicky execution. While the surprise ending provides a satisfying payoff, having to sit through almost two lumbering hours to arrive at the climactic plot twist (as with Bryan Singer’s modern noir, The Usual Suspects) proved taxing. Linklater could learn a thing or two from Alfred Hitchcock’s masterful examples of how to build suspense throughout a film until it reaches fever pitch, and then unleashing the final shock.
Although A Scanner Darkly serves up a morsel or two of food for thought, what is up on the screen won’t compete with the buttered popcorn in your lap. Unless you wash it down with your drug of choice.
Robert L. Jones is a photojournalist living and working in Minnesota. His work has appeared in Black & White Magazine, Entrepreneur, Hoy! New York, the New York Post, RCA Victor (Japan), Scene in San Antonio, Spirit Magazine (Canada), Top Producer, and the Trenton Times. Mr. Jones is a past entertainment editor of The New Individualist.
Topics: Animated Movies, Dramas, Independent Films, Movie Reviews, Rotoscoping, Sci-Fi Movies |
Superman Returns (2006) – Movie Review
By Robert L. Jones | June 29, 2006
Brandon Routh is the man who feel to Earth in "Superman Returns"
Untarnished Steel
[xrr rating=3.5/5]
Superman Returns. Starring Brandon Routh, Kate Bosworth, Kevin Spacey, James Marsden, Parker Posey, Frank Langella, Sam Huntington, Eva Marie Saint, and Marlon Brando. Screenplay by Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris. Based on a story by Bryan Singer, Michael Dougherty, and Dan Harris. Directed by Bryan Singer. (Warner Bros. /Legendary Pictures, 2006, Color, 154 minutes. MPAA Rating: PG-13.)
After a nearly two-decades-long absence, the Man of Steel returns to the big screen in this superb fifth installment in the Superman series. But this belated movie is actually more of a sequel to the first two Superman films, the second released a quarter century ago in 1981.
Director Richard Donner, novelist Mario Puzo, and uncredited screenwriter Tom Manckiewicz (listed as “creative consultant” in credits) conceived the initial outing, Superman: The Movie (1978), as a legendary epic of almost Shakespearian dimensions, a saga pitting good versus evil. Unfortunately, their lofty vision was not shared by producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind. Uncomfortable with a serious treatment of the Superman story, they brought in the husband/wife screenwriting team David and Leslie Newman to make the script more “campy,” à la the 1960s “Batman” TV series.
As a result of creative differences, and the Salkinds’ refusal to pay Marlon Brando’s steep royalties, Donner was replaced with director Richard Lester on the next installment, Superman II, and much of Donner’s original footage was left on the proverbial cutting room floor. Fortunately, cinematic history has been kind to Richard Donner. On November 28, Warner Home Video finally releases his authorized version of Superman II, not only restoring scenes with Brando back into the film, but also restoring Donner to his rightful place as director.
To understand the downward spiral of the Superman franchise, consider 1983’sSuperman III, written solely by the Newmans and directed by Lester. An appalling collection of poorly timed slapstick gags, it has earned the dubious distinction of being the only movie in which comedian Richard Pryor can’t buy a laugh. Superman IV in 1987 was even more unwatchable, suffering from bargain-basement production values and a PC script that reduced Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s classic superhero to a “No Nukes,” Bleeding-Heart of Steel.
Now, years after lesser filmmakers left the Man of Steel in rust, director Bryan Singer finally restores the untarnished, larger-than-life superhero to his pedestal.
Comparisons between Superman Returns and Superman: The Movie are inevitable, especially because Singer and screenwriters Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris consciously planned this film to have the same look, feel, and sound of the original. The most obvious similarity is in casting relative newcomer Brandon Routh in the role of Superman/Kal-El/Clark Kent. Routh bears an uncanny resemblance to the young Christopher Reeve; indeed, he looks as though he could be Reeve’s younger brother.
Superman Returns builds upon the plot of the first Reeve movie, and part of the second. To explain Superman’s absence from the screen during the past nineteen years, Singer brings him back to Earth after a five-year self-imposed exile, during which time he trekked among the stars searching for the remains of his home planet, Krypton.
The movie opens with an amazing special-effects sequence as Superman’s spaceborne ship hurtles through the galaxies back to Earth, returning to his family farm outside Smallville, USA. Voiceover monologue from his father, Jor-El—taken from Marlon Brando’s unused footage for Superman II—sets the tone for the drama that follows. “Because of their [Earthlings’] capacity for good, I send them you, my only son.” Using Christ-like visual imagery, Superman is cast as Earth’s savior, rescuing the planet time and again from those who wield the capacity for evil.
After a brief reunion with earthly mother Martha Kent, played by Eva Marie Saint, Superman reclaims his alter ego, Clark Kent, and his job in Metropolis as reporter for the Daily Planet. Things haven’t changed much at the paper, except that cell phones have replaced desk sets and typewriters have been retired in favor of personal computers. Otherwise, editor Perry White (Frank Langella) is just as gruff as ever. Shutterbug Jimmy Olsen (Sam Huntington) is still the same earnest greenhorn, and the only reporter in the MSM, aside from Tucker Carlson, still sporting a tacky bow tie.
But one important thing has changed. When Superman left on his intergalactic quest for his roots, former lover Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth), the Planet’s ace reporter, believed she’d been ditched. Feeling betrayed, Lois won a Pulitzer Prize for an article, “Why the World Doesn’t Need Superman.” “The world doesn’t need a savior,” she tells Clark, “and neither do I.” He is devastated to learn that, on the rebound, she has given her heart to Richard White (James Marsden), the boss’s nephew. What’s worse, Lois and Richard now have a son, Jason.
Meanwhile, having discovered Superman’s secret hideaway, the Fortress of Solitude, arch-enemy Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey) launches a diabolical scheme using crystals laced with Kryptonite—the radioactive remains of Superman’s planet that render him powerless. Placed in the Atlantic Ocean, the crystals multiply, creating a huge, artificial island that displaces enough ocean water to threaten much of North Americawith flooding. It’s an ecological disaster right out of Al Gore’s worst nightmares, one that will force millions to turn to Luthor if they want to stay dry. Cha-ching!
Brandon Routh more than fills Chris Reeve’s boots, and also those of George Reeves, the square-jawed actor who portrayed Superman in serial movies and on television during the 1950s. Like Reeve, Routh convincingly projects the superheroic qualities of Herculean strength and speed, as well as honor, chivalry, and courage. However, this loner-hero is cast in a more human, vulnerable light, though without ever mocking his dignity and heroic stature. This is a nobler Superman: all the annoying touches that in previous movies were meant to undermine the character are absent here.
Every superhero needs a supervillain in order to bring out his best virtues, and the movie delivers by casting Kevin Spacey as Lex Luthor. Although Gene Hackman is a great actor, he underplayed in the Luthor role a generation ago, almost to the point of nonchalance. Part of his failure to portray a true supervillain was due to his goofy wardrobe and even goofier sidekick (Ned Beatty). The sheer silliness undercut his credibility as a viable threat to Superman.
By contrast, Spacey’s Luthor is a plausible adversary for the Man of Steel. “Gods are selfish beings who fly around in little red capes and don’t share their powers with anyone else,” Luthor snarls. Spacey’s characterization conveys that, for little men with big ambitions, envy of the good can be the most corrupting motive. When I first saw Spacey in American Beauty (1999), his smarminess as anti-hero Lester Burnham really rubbed me the wrong way. But after seeing him as Jack Lemmon’s duplicitous boss in Glengarry Glen Ross and as the deliciously sociopathic Luthor here, I find him uniquely suited to playing cads and villains.
Kate Bosworth is somewhat less successful as Lois Lane. Undoubtedly a better actress than the previous Lois (Margot Kidder), Bosworth’s waifish looks and spiral curls aren’t what come to mind when you think of the spunky journalist from the DC comic books. A stronger, more alluring actress, such as Hilary Swank, would have been perfect to play the female lead in Superman’s life.
All in all, however, Superman Returns is a widescreen extravaganza with something for everyone.
For the guys, it has street cred as an action flick, with its shoot-’em-up pyrotechnics and computer-generated images. These are truly spectacular, because they don’t look so much like special effects as like natural camerawork. In fact, this film comes off as even more realistic than another visually impressive superhero flick, Spiderman II.
For the women in the audience, the movie offers a heart-rending story of unrequited love, though hinting at the possible reconciliation of the (literally) star-crossed lovers in the next film in the franchise, planned for release in 2009.
For fans of John Williams’s soaring score in the 1978 film, there is composer John Ottman’s skillful weaving of Williams’s brassy fanfare into the new soundtrack, and conductor Damon Intrabartolo’s lush interpretation.
For older movie buffs, Superman Returns also boasts the first reunion (in dialogue, thanks to the sound editors) of the late Marlon Brando and actress Eva Marie Saint since they appeared as working-class lovers in Elia Kazan’s 1954 classic, On the Waterfront.
And for the kids, the picture provides not just grand entertainment but also some wonderful lessons. Its themes of gallantry, honor, and bravery will cause even many adults to revert to the child’s uncorrupted and innocent point of view. In fact, when we saw this movie at an advance critics’ screening—in midtown Manhattan, no less—that was exactly how that normally blasé audience reacted.
If a bunch of aging, cynical critics can “Wow!” aloud at the implausible actions of their childhood hero, boo and jeer at the soulless villain, and rise to a raucous standing ovation at the end, then Superman Returns may just be the savior that Hollywood has needed during all the years that he’s been gone.
Robert L. Jones is a photojournalist living and working in Minnesota. His work has appeared in Black & White Magazine, Entrepreneur, Hoy! New York, the New York Post, RCA Victor (Japan), Scene in San Antonio, Spirit Magazine (Canada), Top Producer, and the Trenton Times. Mr. Jones is a past entertainment editor of The New Individualist.
Topics: Action Movies, Fantasy Movies, Graphic Novel Adaptations, Movie Reviews, Sequels |
