Three Summer Movies
Film reviews by Jeff Meyer
Copyright 1988 Jeff Meyer
DIE HARD
Well, it starts out with Bruce Willis (taciturn New York cop) in his wife's LA office in expensive high-rise office tower housing big executive Christmas party. He's in his undershirt, making fists with his toes in the carpet, like any white male during the holiday season. But wait! What's this? Big black trucks with ominous music heading for the Century City tower! Guys with Germanic accents! A terrorist who looks like Huey Lewis! Explosions! A younger clone of David Warner! Surface-to-surface missiles! Dumb Feds! Smart street cops! The dickless guy from GHOSTBUSTERS being dickless again! Lots of fashionable swearing!
Must be summer...
Actually, DIE HARD is pretty entertaining. It's like a two-hour plus MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE episode, livened a bit by good action photography, a decent score (except for a one-minute excerpt of James Horner's Marching Klingon music at the end), Willis' conversations with an LA street cop and a limo driver, and competent attention to detail throughout, except for the conclusion, which sacrifices a lot of logic to provide domestic bliss and one last thrill. It's popcorn entertainment at it's very best, i.e. plastic-thin but will keep you happy for the duration. 70mm and Dolby stereo help a LOT.
$4 worth.
TRAVELLING NORTH
The thing that separates melodrama from drama is how well written the characters are, and if it's acted, how good are the performances. In TRAVELLING NORTH, the answers are respectively good and very good. Leo McKern plays a retiring civil engineer in his seventies who retires to the northern shore of Australia with women who is younger than him by a decade or two. McKern is a grouchy old socialist who can be quite a tyrant with his new companion and his neighbors. What's more, his health begins failing him, and his SO is torn between staying with him in an almost servile capacity as his health fails (and his temperament gets worse) and visiting her daughters from a previous marriage living in Perth, who are having their own problems. The film deals with intelligent people having a relationship in their twilight years, and all in all it does it quite well. The dialogue is fine, understated and is never over-dramatic. McKern puts in a very fine non-Rumpole performance, and his fellow actors and actresses put in an honest day's work. I came out of TRAVELLING NORTH strangely refreshed; it's not a big film in any sense, but it is a quietly satisfying one.
$4 worth.
BIG
All I can say is that *this* is comic genius, to watch Tom Hanks play a thirteen-year-old in a man's body. The credit shouldn't go to Hanks alone, of course; the script and the direction by Penny Marshall give out for no more than four or five minutes in the entire film, and the whole principle twist of the film -- that a boy of thirteen can prosper by seeing the world in his adolescent terms -- is carried out beautifully, rather like a variation of Peter Sellers' Chauncey Gardner's trip through high society. What's more, Marshall and Hank's constantly underline how much of the "adult" world of business inherits the foibles of the child's playground. The theme is constantly spotlighted, but always in a way clever enough not to breed familiarity (and thus contempt). And there are some beautiful bits here: the first check, the meeting on the "building transformer," and the decoration of Hank's apartment. The cocktail party scene should definitely be remembered come Oscar time, if only for the corn and caviar jokes.
Enough verbiage. I laughed my *ass* off through this film, and the audience gave applauded it at the end (pretty good for a film in its eighth or ninth week).
$5 no question. Treat yourself...
Moriarty, aka Jeff Meyer
INTERNET: moriarty@tc.fluke.COM
Manual UUCP: {uw-beaver, sun, microsoft}!fluke!moriarty
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews