Thursday Movie Picks - Tall Buildings

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!

This week, on Thursday Movie Picks! Up, up, up to incredible heights! The heights of skyscrapers!

I really have nothing much more to say about tall buildings so.... let's just get right to it.

The Towering Inferno (John Guillermin, 1974) An attempt to recreate the "success" of producer Irwin B. Allen's previous hit The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno pretty much succeeds at that goal, offering more explosions, more stars, and... well... more of pretty much everything. If it's not quite as entertaining as Poseidon, well, that's because it perhaps follows that film's template a bit too closely. But it's still one of the best  - and certainly the starriest - of the '70s big-budget all-star disaster epics.

Sleepless in Seattle (Nora Ephron, 1993) Consider this me cheating a little, because I'm kinda getting two in one, one of which I haven't seen. You see, Meg Ryan's Annie Reed gets the idea to meet a man she has never met, only heard on talk radio, on the top of the Empire State Building, from the classic An Affair to Remember, a film which I am ashamed to say I haven't seen. But this one, I have, and it is such a delight. They just don't make great romantic comedies like this anymore, with enchanting leads (this is the second of three pairings of Hanks and Ryan, and easily their best), genuine conflict, and terrific, relatable supporting characters (Rosie O'Donnell is just the best, isn't she?). God bless Nora Eprhon for this.

Man on Wire (James Marsh, 2008) In 1974, French acrobat Philippe Petit walked on a tightrope between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. This is the story of how he accomplished this illegal, but magical, act. It's an amazing story, told through interviews, real footage, and recreated footage in a seamless assemblage that director Marsh makes feel like a thriller of sorts. It's exhilarating, funny, and endlessly entertaining - which you can rarely say for a documentary!

Hit Me With Your Best Shot - Splash

Written (for the last time?!? GOD I hope not!) for the series hosted by Nathaniel R. at The Film Experience.

1984 is the year I was born. So naturally, I'm not particularly well-versed in the films that came out around that time. It's nothing against those films, it's just that at the time I was far more interested in eating and pooping and didn't know what movies were. For a long time, though, I just sort of assumed that Amadeus was the greatest film ever made ONLY because it won Best Picture for 1984. Thankfully, it didn't disappoint one bit when I finally saw it years later.

But we're not here to talk about Amadeus. Oh, no. We are here to talk about that OTHER classic from 1984, Ron Howard's fish out of water tale Splash, starring the supremely unlikely couple of Darryl Hannah and Tom Hanks. I had seen bits and pieces of Splash over the years, but this was my first time seeing it all the way through. I have to admit, my reaction to it has somewhat soured knowing that the film was originally written as the story of a mermaid trying to adjust to life in Manhattan, but no one greenlit the script until they flipped it around and made the man she falls in love with the main character. Now, by all means, the original idea might have been the worse movie, but especially in today's cultural climate, I can't help but being a bit annoyed by it... OF COURSE the story originally had a female lead and OF COURSE no one would make it until they changed it to a male lead. AND, to make matters worse/more interesting, the recently announced remake starring Channing Tatum (of all people) in the Darryl Hannah role is said to be based off of one of the earlier versions of the script, meaning that once again the main character is going to be male.

Sorry for the tangent. I just really had to get that off my chest.

Because really, Splash is a perfectly fine film, one that plays just as well today as I'm sure it did back when it was initially released. Sure, Hannah is a little stiff, but that's partly the character, and she really shines in the gorgeous underwater close-ups Howard and DP Don Peterman (aka the guy who shot my beloved Flashdance) give her:

Thursday Movie Picks - Astronauts

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.

Thursday Movie Picks: Movies about Music/Making Music/Musicians

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 telling us about them!

Well, October is over, so back to our "regularly-scheduled programming" (read: non-scary) on Thursday Movie Picks. This week: Movies centered around music. I had to re-pick this week as I missed the note on there being no films based on real-life people, so... here goes!

Almost Famous (Cameron Crowe, 2000) I can't even with this movie. One of my All-Time Favorites. Crowe's semi-autobiographical film so perfectly captures the feeling of not just a specific time and place, but of that time in one's life between childhood and adulthood. I could go on and on about the perfect cast (Frances McDormand as one of the all-time great screen mothers... Kate Hudson in a luminous star-making turn... Billy Crudup and Jason Lee with AMAZING period hair... Patrick Fugit as the most appealing narrator ever... Philip Seymour Hoffman cracking wise and dispensing wisdom....), but what I really love about Almost Famous is the feeling it conjures up, and how effortlessly it plays.

That Thing You Do! (Tom Hanks, 1996) You'd think Tom Hanks would have directed more after this perfectly entertaining film about a 60's band's rise to the top. He's even great in it as the band's big-label manager. Tom Everett Scott, Jonathan Schaech, Steve Zahn, and Ethan Embry make for great distinctive personalities as the band members, and Liv Tyler makes an impression as "The Girl". And the soundtrack is to DIE. Long Live The Oneders!

Frank (Lenny Abrahamson, 2014) This isn't a GREAT film, but it does contain what is possibly Michael Fassbender's best performance as the giant-head wearing musical genius Frank, and a great performance from Maggie Gyllenhall as one of his band members - a much more typical role for her, but damn if she isn't PERFECT. The music is at points extremely weird, but also kind of perfect for what it is, and often laugh-out-loud funny. Domnhall Gleeson makes for a perfectly agreeable narrator, and the film is a good watch. But it doesn't have much staying power outside of Fassbender's performance. Also: He has a surprisingly good singing voice, if not "good" in a traditional sense.