Written as part of the weekly blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. Take part in the fun by picking three movies that fit the week's theme and telling us about them - couldn't be easier!
What an interesting, tantalizingly vague topic for this week's Thursday Movie Picks! Immortals, huh? Like, gods? Or vampires? Or legends, who may die but will live forever in other ways?
Somehow, I managed to not quite go down any of those routes. Although I had initially wanted to be very cheeky and pick three movies with legendary actors playing legendary people (like, say, Lincoln, Amadeus, and Ali... not that it necessarily would have been those three exactly, but you get the idea), I decided against it because somehow, it just didn't feel quite right somehow. But still, I think these three fit the bill for this week quite nicely.
Death Becomes Her (Robert Zemeckis, 1992) What would you do if you had the opportunity to remain young forever, WITHOUT becoming a vampire? I don't know about you, but of the many, MANY things I would do, fight with my best frenemy about a wimpy, mustachioed Bruce Willis is not one of them. Oh, I kid, I kid. Willis is actually damn funny in this, as the man torn between Meryl Streep's actress Madeline Ashton and Goldie Hawn's author, both of whom have taken a potion provided by Isabella Rossellini (who else?) that provides eternal youth. This zany camp classic has aged remarkably well, and I'm not just talking about the groundbreaking visual effects. This gets to the heart of the love-hate relationships between women better than perhaps any other movie released in the modern era. It's also perfectly cast from top to bottom.
The Picture of Dorian Gray (Albert Lewin, 1945) Oscar Wilde's immortal story of a young man so beautiful that his portrait takes on all the rot of age and moral decay for him is far more tantalizing to read than to watch, but even this early filming of the tale gets at the horror of the story in ways the book does not. Hurd Hatfield is a perfect Dorian Gray, and Angela Lansbury is lovely as the gutter girl Sibyl Vane who may have stood a chance at stealing his heart, if it hadn't already turned black as pitch. Plus, the horrifying ending really exploits everything you can do with film, as pure a coup de cinéma as has ever existed.
Beetlejuice (Tim Burton, 1988) What? I had to throw in something remotely off-center! You can't deny that the "ghost with the most" isn't immortal - he's been around for over 600 years, and given the number on his ticket in the waiting room final scene, he's going to be around for a whole lot longer than that! So what if he's technically part of the after-life? He is living there, after all! Michael Keaton's performance as the titular "bio-exorcist" (a ghost who gets rid of the living) is one of the greatest comedic performances of all time, a hyper-committed work of near-insanity that creates a wholly original character out of nothing. There's nothing else like it. And come to think of it, there's nothing really like this movie, either. It's the ultimate horror-comedy, deliciously designed, perfectly cast (really, AMPAS, you couldn't find room at the Oscars for ONE of the film's magnificent Supporting Actresses?!?), and undoubtedly the work of an utterly singular director. It's a pity what Tim Burton has become over the past decade. The likelihood of getting something as fun as this from him again is LOW.
Written as part of the series hosted by Nathaniel R. at The Film Experience.
This is going to be quick and dirty, because my sister's wedding has had me BUSY over the past five days. But it has also had me full of love, and I simply couldn't let this particular episode of Hit Me... to go by without showing love, because Death Becomes Her is a film I LOVE in all its brilliant, campy glory. Is it a perfect film? No. But it is a pretty great genre hybrid film, and one of the few outright great intentionally campy films, because going for camp is pretty much the only way to make a satirical horror/comedy not feel like an unfocused mess. Which the film actually might very well be. But I haven't seen it in a while, so I can't say for sure.
What I can say for sure is that there is a whole hell of a lot of joy in this film, from Meryl Streep's flawless diva-tude to Isabella Rossellini's flawless... well... flawlessness. When I think of Death Becomes Her (which is often), there are pretty much two things I think of: Isabella's slinky-sexy death-defying goddess (seriously, she just DEMANDS worship simply by just being on screen) and this little old shot right here:
NOTHING in the film makes me laugh harder, which is quite a feat considering how fucking funny the whole thing is. And actually, the VFX in this particular shot perhaps haven't held up quite as well as I remember. But Goldie Hawn plays it so perfectly. And Dean Cudney's camera knows that the best thing to do is just sit back and observe. Timing is everything in comedy, and Goldie's timing, along with the timing of the camera movement, are simply perfection.
Written as part of the weekly blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. Join in the fun by picking three movies that fit the week's theme and writing a bit about them.
I'm a little late posting this week, but it is Thursday, and thus, time for Thursday Movie Picks...
... IN SPACE!!!!!!!
I have always been fascinated by astronauts, and wanted to be one for quite a long time in my youth. I remember begging my parents to let me go to space camp but it never happened. Ah, what could have been!
But at any rate, my love affair with outer space took a serious hit upon seeing one of my picks for this week. I decided that it was far too dangerous a profession for me, and another one of my picks this week confirmed that not only was it dangerous, but that it mostly involved work on the ground on Earth. WTF?! Here are my picks, going from Earth to outer space.
Contact (Robert Zemeckis, 1997) I'm maybe cheating a little with this one because Jodie Foster's character isn't technically an astronaut, but she does go into space. Maybe. It depends on your interpretation of what actually happens in the film's last act journey. But what I love most about Contact - besides Jodie Foster, of course - is how it focuses on the daily drudgery of work related to outer space. It's comparable to archeology: Most of it is slow and procedural, but once in a blue moon something truly exciting and magical happens. Consider this the "thinking person's outer space movie," and a damn good one.
Apollo 13 (Ron Howard, 1995) This film looks at both what happens on the ground at Mission Control and what happens in space during an actual mission. Of course, this is one of those "based on a true story" movies, so most people going in already know what's going to happen (NASA has a bad case of Murphy's Law on the Apollo 13 mission to the moon, but through genius, outside-the-box thinking, manages to get their boys home), but that doesn't make any of Ron Howard's film any less suspenseful, surprising, or heartbreaking. The cast and filmmaking are rock-solid, and the special effects remain convincing to this day. The whole story did a number on me as an 11 year-old, though: After seeing it, I abandoned all desires to ever go into outer space. I'm still a huge astronomy nut, though.
Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón, 2013) ...that said, I don't think I've ever seen a single image in all cinema that has inspired such fear deep in the pit of my gut as the one that ends Gravity's bravura opening seventeen-minute continuous shot - showing Sandra Bullock's Dr. Ryan Stone tumbling away into the black vastness of space. That Alfonso Cuarón's masterpiece somehow only gets more intense and thrilling from there seems impossible, but it is gloriously true. I was so impressed with this when I first saw it in IMAX 3D that I went back not a week later to see it in regular 2D just to see if it held up, and boy did it EVER. This is the most thrilling film of the '00s, an explosion of pure cinema that restored my faith in the art's ability to inspire awe, and Exhibit A for why you should see movies on the biggest screen possible, not on your freaking phone.
