A to Z Challenge 2020 - C

Cast Away (2000)
Director: Robert Zemeckis
Starring: Tom Hanks, Helen Hunt, Wilson
Brief Thoughts: For a lot of people during COVID-19, this whole movie might end up being a giant metaphor. Coincidentally, Tom Hanks even contracted the Coronavirus, but he’s better now. I still find it impossible that appreciation for this movie is relatively limited. It’s a perfect showcase for Hanks, and yet, I think for both Hanks and Robert Zemeckis it was used as an excuse to shuffle them away from mass consumption. Hollywood seems legitimately to discredit filmmakers if they spend too long in the spotlight. And while Hanks remains active today and can garner the occasional hit film, he had not been a serious Oscar contender since winning two in the ‘90s. By any reasonable standard he ought to have won for Cast Away. (Russell Crowe won that year for Gladiator, and of course within a few years he ended up blackballed despite continuing his consistent excellent work.) The ending of Cast Away even brilliantly subverts the stereotypical Hollywood ending. Basically a movie that will have a long shadow.

Children of Men (2006)
Director: Alfonso Cuarón
Starring: Clive Owen, Julianne Moore, Michael Caine, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Charlie Hunnam
Brief Thoughts: Clive Owen may be the opposite of a Tom Hanks or a Russell Crowe, in that he was never particularly a big star, but his consistent excellence makes it perhaps okay to distill his legacy into a single great movie, which of course is what Children of Men is. In a different era Owen would have been Bogie (nearly chose Casablanca for inclusion today, but am sticking with relatively recent movies), but his roles in recent years have been limited mostly to supporting ones. Bogie never relinquished the spotlight once Hollywood figured him out.

Collateral (2004)
Director: Michael Mann
Starring: Tom Cruise, Jamie Foxx, Jada Pinkett Smith, Mark Ruffalo
Brief Thoughts: This is actually ones of the movies I’ve watched in the past month, so I’m glad for an opportunity to talk about it here. Like John Travolta, Tom Cruise has been battling backlash to his membership in Scientology over the past few decades. Unlike Travolta, Cruise has managed to maintain a viable movie career, thanks in large part to his Mission: Impossible films. The fact that most of his recent roles have been in action movies suggests he believes that’s the only way to remain relevant, which means his dramatic roles, recently, have been few and far between, which, for me, makes all the more valuable. And Collateral is a very good one. It’s the reason Jamie Foxx had a major movie career for a few years, which allowed him to make movies like Ray, Django Unchained, and The Soloist (which was undeservedly ignored on original release).

Collateral Beauty (2016)
Director: David Frankel
Starring: Will Smith, Edward Norton, Kate Winslet, Helen Mirren, Keira Knightley, Michael Peña, Naomie Harris
Brief Thoughts: In the tradition of Seven Pounds, Will Smith stars in an instant classic drama that’s...completely ignored. Filled to bursting with an excellent supporting cast around him, Smith is at his typical best as a grieving father who can’t move on with his life until fate intervenes. One of those movies where if there was any conversation about it at all, no one seems to have seen the movie  itself before talking about it (another example: Passengers).

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002)
Director: George Clooney
Starring: Sam Rockwell, Drew Barrymore, George Clooney, Julia Roberts
Brief Thoughts: Sam Rockwell is probably one of the most inexplicable movie stars ever. His breakthrough role in The Green Mile might have typecast him as unsavory, and yet he just keeps showing up in spotlight roles and even starring in movies (one of his many highlights: Moon). Probably the one that got him to this point is Confessions, which you can probably assume at this point is, to my mind, inexplicably underappreciated.

Coriolanus (2012)
Director: Ralph Fiennes
Starring: Ralph Fiennes, Gerard Butler, Vanessa Redgrave, Jessica Chastain, Brian Cox
Brief Thoughts: Almost the default for modern Shakespeare in film is Kenneth Branagh, but this one comes from Ralph Fiennes. My interest, however, is in Gerard Butler. Probably for pretty much everyone this bit of casting is inexplicable. Even though Butler’s career began well before 300 (consider, for instance, his featured roles in Timeline and Phantom of the Opera, where he played the Phantom), he became in the popular (and Hollywood) imagination stuck in the role of a big dumb brute. Eventually this threatened to curtail his career entirely, but recently he’s been making sequels to Olympus Has Fallen, and I have little doubt he’ll find a way to keep his career interesting.