The best and worst things that ever happened to “It’s a Wonderful Life” are that it fell out of copyright protection and into the shadowy no-man’s-land of the public domain. Because the movie is no longer under copyright, any television station that can get its hands on a print of the movie can show it, at no cost, as often as it wants to. And that has led in the last decade to the rediscovery of Frank Capra‘s once-forgotten film, and its elevation into a Christmas tradition. PBS stations were the first to jump on the bandwagon in the early 1970s, using the saga of the small-town hero George Bailey as counter-programming against expensive network holiday specials. To the general amazement of TV program directors, the audience for the film grew and grew over the years, until now many families make the movie an annual ritual.
What is remarkable about “It’s a Wonderful Life” is how well it holds up over the years; it’s one of those ageless movies, like “Casablanca” or “The Third Man,” that improves with age. Some movies, even good ones, should only be seen once. When we know how they turn out, they’ve surrendered their mystery and appeal. Other movies can be viewed an indefinite number of times. Like great music, they improve with familiarity. “It’s a Wonderful Life” falls in the second category.
Frank Capra never intended “It’s a Wonderful Life” to be pigeonholed as a “Christmas picture.” This was the first movie he made after returning from service in World War II, and he wanted it to be special–a celebration of the lives and dreams of America’s ordinary citizens, who tried the best they could to do the right thing by themselves and their neighbors. After becoming Hollywood’s poet of the common man in the 1930s with an extraordinary series of populist parables (“It Happened One Night,” “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,” “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” “You Can’t Take It With You”), Capra found the idea for “It’s a Wonderful Life” in a story by Philip Van Doren Stern that had been gathering dust on studio shelves.
For Stewart, also recently back in civilian clothes, the movie was a chance to work again with Capra, for whom he had played Mr. Smith. The original trailer for the movie (included on the Criterion disk) played up the love angle between Stewart and Donna Reed and played down the message–but the movie was not a box office hit, and was all but forgotten before the public domain prints began to make their rounds.
“The Matrix” is a visually dazzling cyberadventure, full of kinetic excitement, but it retreats to formula just when it’s getting interesting. It’s kind of a letdown when a movie begins by redefining the nature of reality, and ends with a shoot-out. We want a leap of the imagination, not one of those obligatory climaxes with automatic weapons fire.
The plot involves Neo (Keanu Reeves), a mild-mannered software author by day, a feared hacker by night. He’s recruited by a cell of cyber-rebels, led by the profound Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) and the leather-clad warrior Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss). They’ve made a fundamental discovery about the world: It doesn’t exist. It’s actually a form of Virtual Reality, designed to lull us into lives of blind obedience to the “system.” We obediently go to our crummy jobs every day, little realizing, as Morpheus tells Neo, that “Matrix is the wool that has been pulled over your eyes–that you are a slave.” The rebels want to crack the framework that holds the Matrix in place, and free mankind. Morpheus believes Neo is the Messianic “One” who can lead this rebellion, which requires mind power as much as physical strength. Arrayed against them are the Agents, who look like Blues Brothers. The movie’s battles take place in Virtual Reality; the heroes’ minds are plugged into the combat. (You can still get killed, though: “The body cannot live without the mind”). “Jacking in” like this was a concept in “Strange Days” and has also been suggested in novels by William Gibson (“Idoru”) and others. The notion that the world is an artificial construction, designed by outsiders to deceive and use humans, is straight out of “Dark City.” Both of those movies, however, explored their implications as the best science fiction often does. “Dark City” was fascinated by the Strangers who had a poignant dilemma: They were dying aliens who hoped to learn from human methods of adaptation and survival.
First released in 1946 and now being revived for selected screenings around the country and an extended run at the National Film Theatre, The Big Sleep is a film of infinite interest. In its famously knowing trailer, Humphrey Bogart walks into the Hollywood Public Library and asks for “a good mystery like The Maltese Falcon“. A librarian gives him a copy of what is misleadingly described as “Raymond Chandler’s latest”, adding: “What a picture that’ll make!” Well, it did, and the result can be approached from a number of distinct and complementary directions.
First, it’s a Warner Brothers production, made at the height of Hollywood’s big studio era and announced by Warner’s logo, which looks like a federal badge of social responsibility. Jack L Warner, who’d headed the studio since the early 1920s, determined what films were made, how and by whom, their cost and which contract performers appeared in them; their smart, stocky, wisecracking heroes looked a lot like Warner himself.
Mad Max 2, the ultimate film in the series. An awesome action film that never ceases to blow people away with it’s interesting/quirky/crazy characters and action packed chase sequences. It sets the standard for every other Mad Max film and stands as one of the greatest action films of all time.
The year is 2021. The world is in the grip of a fearful pandemic. Governments struggle to maintain law and order. George Miller’s The Road Warrior starts in the dying throes of the battle for gas. Max (Mel Gibson) has a cool car (‘the last of the V8 Interceptors’), a loving friend in his dog and a tough, survivalist attitude. Max comes across a peaceful community under siege from various violent malcontents who have penned them into a compound where one of the world’s last few oil-wells is still providing a source of the black stuff. Max manages to get inside, and agrees to help them capture a driving rig to help them export their precious cargo to safety. Once his mission is complete, all Max wants is his car back and a full tank of fuel; “I’m just here for the gasoline’ says Max, but his humanism is stirred by watching a child’s face delighted by the chimes of a music box.
A ‘white-line nightmare’, The Road Warrior is one of cinema’s best action films; a series of brilliant calculations means that despite the futuristic setting, absolutely everything we see on screen looks practical and real because it is; building your own cars, weapons and compounds never looked so probable or impressive. Max is an everyman, simply trying to get by without the aspirations for power and control that others have, and like ordinary people everywhere, he gets shafted over and over again as a result. “The vermin have inherited the earth’ as a bit of graffiti says, and the best result we can hope for against such persistent opposition is to survive another day. The Road Warrior isn’t perfect, use of filters and speeded up film is regrettable, and even on blu-ray some of the night-time scenes look very grainy. But it is a classic turbo-charge tale of men and machines, and in times of crisis, sends out a positive message that someone, some-way, we’ll get through this together, even if ordinary people being the fall guy is the only option in the daily grind.
Essentially, Zhivago is a story about the clash between man and the state, the imperishable, resilient individual refusing to be patterned or flattened. “The individual means nothing, comrade,” says one of the new commissars to Zhivago, in a moment of the Revolution’s violent birth. The picture records the Soviet attempt to obliterate the individual, to make him part of the machinery of the state.
The hero of the story is both a doctor and a poet. These are fields of individual decision and creation. A doctor may not choose his patients for their political beliefs. A poet may versify for the state but it will not be poetry, the clarion song of indomitable man. Zhivago’s story, from Czarist Russia through the debacle of Russia’s part in World War I, and the murderous terror of the early Soviet state to the period beyond, when a secure government could afford to be more human, or, at any rate, less inhuman. That, at least, is the premise.
Zhivago is not one of the earth shakers. His is the kind who preserves and observes. He is the eye of the camera for the spectator, his is the heart of the spectator responding to events: the cruelties of the Czar’s regime in the name of the divine right of kings; the idealistic hopes of those who overthrew the despot; the conversion of the idealists into new oppressors of the people, this time in the people’s name.
Zhivago, played by Omar Sharif, is neither imperialist nor socialist. Although orphaned, he is raised in a happy, prosperous household. His foster parents are Ralph Richardson and Siobhan McKenna. Their daughter, Geraldine Chaplin, grows up with him. They grow to love one another and are married.
Their lives have been touched only tangentially by the subterranean rumblings and muffled explosions that have begun to shatter the flawed facade of Romanov Russia. Others have been more intimately involved. Julie Christie is seduced by her mother’s lover, the cynical and opportunistic Rod Steiger. She recoils from that experience to marry the idealistic young revolutionary Tom Courtenay. At first all these lives are separately seen, and only come together as the struggle gains intensity. The whole story is told in retrospect, in flashback. Alec Guinness, who has survived all the tergiversations of Csarist-Soviet Russia, seeks out the daughter of Sharif and Miss Christie, to make her aware of her heritage. She is played by Rita Tushingham.
Zhivago is not a film that attempts to evaluate the communist theory and practice in Russia. It records the Czarist oppression that produced the revolution. It points out some of the situations that occasioned the Soviet tyrannies. In its treatment of modern Russia it does not seem, in the Soviet lexicon, “provocative.” Robert Bolt’s screenplay of Boris Pasternak’s novel, and David Lean’s direction of it, have made the political tides as inexorable as the vast Russian landscape, and its climatic weathers as important as the ideological temperatures.
Lean, filming in Spain and Finland, creates the immensity of Russia, the loneliness such vastness imparts to its people. There is a deep melancholy underlying much of the spirit, the sadness of people not only oppressed but chronically isolated. This explains and excuses. Sharif, happily married to Miss Chaplin, is irresistibly drawn to Miss Christie, unhappily married to Courtenay. The chaos of the post-revolution separates Sharif and Miss Chaplin. In the end he dies only a few yards away from Miss Christie, a fact unknown to her. Yet their lives have meaning in his poems and in their child.
Sharif must create a man who is outside the great upheaval but not insensitive to its causes and results. His special quality of projecting mysticism has never served him better. He has the doctor’s compassion and the poet’s sympathy, and a handsome man’s irresistible appeal to women. Miss Chaplin makes an appealing debut as his sweet and innocent wife. She bears a startling resemblance to her father, especially in her smile. She is not called on for strong displays of emotion. Within the limits of her role, she is winsome.
Julie Christie, as the child of turbulence, who must meet some of life’s cruelest situations and retain her intrinsic freshness and beauty, is superb. Miss Christie has already indicated that she is one of the most important young film stars, and she reinforces that position with this portrayal. She gives an indelible performance as the young woman who is inspiration for Zhivago’s poetry and for life. She must make both inspirations unalterably compelling, and she does.
Alec Guinness, who ties the film together with the opening and closing scenes, and occasionally with bits of narration, is able to suggest a family tenderness as Zhivago’s half-brother, and implacable officialdom as the Soviet general he becomes. Siobhan McKenna is effective as Zhivago’s foster mother, and Ralph Richardson delightful as his foster-father. He makes his role humanistic, amiable and endearing.
Tom Courtenay moulds a modern Machiavelli of his young idealist, brutalized by his oppressors, the Czar’s Cossacks and the heedless ruling class, into a cold killer in the name of human freedom. Courtenay has an abrupt character transition to make, and he achieves it with finesse and complete credibility. Rod Steiger gives his finest movie performance as the opportunistic lawyer who cheerfully robs Zhivago of his inheritance, Miss Christie of her virtue, and always seems to remain on top, a success with royalists or communists. He is a heartless blackguard but possessed of an infestious life force that is engaging if not commendable. Miss Tushingham, with very few lines of dialogue, imparts the importance to her role that it demands, with her odd little face, expressive as an unspoiled child, and her great, deep eyes.
Zhivago has been recorded on film in Panavision and Metrocolor, and never has the Panavision depth of focus been more ably exploited. The long shots, particularly, black figures against white mountains, etch themselves in the mind as background for the more intimate, colorful scenes that follow; double-imaging, it is, in a subtle corrosive process.
Maurice Jarre’s score is melodic interpretation of the Zhivago spirit, with restatement of a lyric theme, as the poet doctor slogs through despondency and tragedy. Despite the grim and brooding background, Zhivago has a surging buoyant spirit that is unquenchable. Doctor Zhivago is more than a masterful motion picture; it is a life experience.
Don’t Look Up is a clever, unapologetically brash satire about a future America so consumed with celebrity worship, brain-numbing infotainment, social media popularity, and political gamesmanship that it refuses to take the impending destruction of planet Earth seriously. We’re not talking climate change here, though the parallel is obvious. Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) has irrefutable evidence that an unprecedentedly gigantic comet will wipe out Earth in precisely six months, 14 days. The chances of “planet extinction” are set at 99.78%.
“Call it 70% and let’s just move on,” says President Janie Orlean (Meryl Streep), who’s more bothered by the upcoming midterms and the unearthing of nude pics of her sexy boyfriend, a Supreme Court nominee.
Are you an unabashed pessimist about 21st-century America? Do you believe that we’ve reached a point that — to quote W.B. Yeats — “the center cannot hold”? And, most of all, are you in the apparent minority who understands that true satire is a purposeful exaggeration of reality? If so, I say just give this liberating, appropriately cynical, fitfully hilarious film a look.
The adventure continues in this “Star Wars” sequel. Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), Han Solo (Harrison Ford), Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) and Chewbacca (Peter Mayhew) face attack by the Imperial forces and its AT-AT walkers on the ice planet Hoth. While Han and Leia escape in the Millennium Falcon, Luke travels to Dagobah in search of Yoda. Only with the Jedi master’s help will Luke survive when the dark side of the Force beckons him into the ultimate duel with Darth Vader (David Prowse).
Titanic is a 1997 American epic romance and disaster film directed, written, co-produced, and co-edited by James Cameron. Incorporating both historical and fictionalized aspects, it is based on accounts of the sinking of the RMS Titanic, and stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet as members of different social classes who fall in love aboard the ship during its ill-fated maiden voyage.
Upon its release on December 19, 1997, Titanic achieved significant critical and commercial success. Nominated for 14 Academy Awards, and won 11, including the awards for Best Picture and Best Director, tying Ben-Hur (1959) for the most Oscars won by a single film. With an initial worldwide gross of over $1.84 billion, Titanic was the first film to reach the billion-dollar mark. It remained the highest-grossing film of all time until Cameron’s Avatar surpassed it in 2010. A 3D version of Titanic, released on April 4, 2012, to commemorate the centennial of the sinking, earned it an additional $343.6 million worldwide, pushing the film’s worldwide total to $2.18 billion and making it the second film to gross more than $2 billion worldwide (after Avatar). In 2017, the film was re-released for its 20th anniversary and was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.
The Bourne Identity, a 2002 action thriller and its two sequels are probably the best spy movies ever made. Based on a Robert Ludlum novel of the same name, and directed by Doug Liman, the Bourne Identity’s insight into the workings of the intelligence community prefigured the Snowden revelations regarding US government surveillance. The acting is superb, the directing is first class and Tony Gilroy’s and William Blake Herron’s script is intelligent and well crafted. It is regarded by many critics as a neo-noir classic.
Ridley Scott’s movie Gladiator produced in 2000 is reminiscent of the great epic movies of the 1960s, such as Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago. It is monumental movie-making: visually thrilling, technically astonishing, and emotionally engaging. The film won multiple awards, including five Academy Awards at the 73rd Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Actor for Crowe, Best Costume Design, Best Sound and Best Visual Effects. It also received four BAFTA Awards at the 54th British Academy Film Awards for Best Film, Best Cinematography, Best Production Design and Best Editing. Since its release, Gladiator has also been credited with reinventing the swords and sandals genre and rekindling interest in entertainment centered around ancient Greek and ancient Roman culture, such as the TV series Rome.
The Mission produced in 1986 and directed by Roland Joffe is a powerful action epic about a man of the sword (Robert DeNiro) and a man of the cloth (Jeremy Irons) who unite to shield a South American Indian tribe from brutal subjugation by 18th-century Portuguese colonial empire. The film is based on true accounts of Jesuit missionaries who died defending the Guarani Indians from slavery. The movie won acclaim for using Native Guarani Indians as actors and actresses. The Mission won the “Best Picture Award” at the 1986 Cannes Film Festival, and earned seven Academy Awards nominations, including “Best Picture.” The soundtrack composed by Ennio Morricone won the Golden Globe for Original Score . It was used as a soundtrack to the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.
In 1992 Director Ridley Scott created a futuristic dystopia which addressed the question what does it mean to be human. The in camera special effects created by David Dryer, Douglas Trumbull and Richard Yuricich set a new standard for visual effects. The movie starred Harrison Ford as a policeman responsible for finding Replicants robots that looked human and were banned on Earth under penalty of death.
The exploration of the moral and philosophical quandaries that would come with computers and artificial intelligence was present in science fiction books dating back to the ’60s and ’70s – including Phillip K. Dick’s 1968 novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,” which “Blade Runner” is based on. What made “Blade Runner” groundbreaking was it created the visual look, atmosphere and world of cyberpunk. Ridley Scott and his team of incredible technicians built a futuristic Los Angeles that was the perfect extension of the near-future dystopia sci-fi authors were writing about in their books.
As the role technology plays in our daily lives has grown exponentially since the ’70s and ’80s, the themes of the cyberpunk movement have permeated all aspects of popular culture. As a result, the international film market has increasingly gravitated toward this futuristic setting defined by technology – bleeding into genre re-defining superhero movies (“Dark Knight”), action movies (“The Matrix”) and anime (“Ghost in the Shell”) – for which “Blade Runner” is the visual touchstone. It’s a connection that filmmakers like Christopher Nolan, The Wachowskis and “Ghost in the Shell” visionary Mamoru Oshii readily acknowledge.