I managed to round out the end of the alphabet last month (paradoxically I will begin it later). So let’s get started.
William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (1996) Arguably the source of Leonardo DiCaprio’s popular career, the project that led to Titanic, I spent a long time being fascinated by it without really having spent time…watching it. So this rewatch was long in coming. As it turns out, it’s a kind of spastic version of what Hollywood has been so paranoid about, a Tarantinoesque take that doesn’t really understand what “Tarantinoesque” is, but is very clearly trying to be so. Thankfully Baz Lurhmann figured out his mistake in later projects, although he’s never really regained creative trust from the mainstream. I’m hotly anticipating his latest film, Elvis.
Wind River (2017) This was another needful rewatch, and now I have the proper appreciation of its achievement. Director Taylor Sheridan is one of the major filmmakers of the modern era, and Jeremy Renner is one of the significant stars, although neither enjoy enough acclaim for their efforts. Jon Bernthal has a brief but crucial supporting role that lets him, for once, avoid the antagonist’s spot he usually inhabits.
Wing Commander (1999) Popular opinion doesn’t like to admit how it’s formed, but this is a film that’s suffered, since it debuted in theaters, as impossible to measure against The Matrix and, at least as of 1999 (later revisions of taste obviously changed this), The Phantom Menace, and as such hardly worth considering at all, and as such, only worth dismissing at best…But I’ve always liked it. Even fans if the games from which it was adapted couldn’t wrap their heads around this one, since it spends most of its time on a concept unique to it, the idea of prejudice against the main protagonist based on his ancestry. If it had been released any other year prior to the same one in which the first new Star Wars in a near-two decade span, this clear homage to the saga, which still manages to become itself, would have been welcomed far differently.
The World’s End (2013) As it turns out, sometimes if you end up sleeping through most of the first viewing of a movie, you’re probably not really going to get an accurate interpretation of it. What I did see the first time I found…obnoxious. I apparently saw very little, and it only bewildered me. This is Edgar Wright’s final of three collaborations with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. Pegg had become an unlikely Hollywood staple by this point (a regular in Mission: Impossible and Star Trek films as well as star of various films), and as such was beyond being a mere costar with Frost. So in hindsight, and watching, y’know, the whole thing, this is quite the end of an era, and now stands as possibly by favorite of the three (and my previous wasn’t Shaun of the Dead, but Hot Fuzz, which itself will be a keen subject of further rewatching).
The Wrestler (2008) In 2008 mainstream audiences had once again definitively relegated wrestling to a niche market, so the release of a major film production attempting to reverse engineer its appeal by peeling back the curtain. And yet, I think it does so in a fashion it doesn’t really understand. Mickey Rourke’s character is never really put in a definitive context. Wrestling fans are as aware of their history as any other medium. If this were a baseball movie about, say, a Pete Rose figure, that would be pretty clear. But Rourke’s character was created from a false premise. If he is, for instance, Hulk Hogan, or Ric Flair, or Shawn Michaels (who at the time was winding up his career and actually evoking the movie in storylines), his arc would not lead to ending up working in a grocery store. The filmmakers certainly found plenty of aging wrestlers who were leading such lives, but a Hogan, a Flair, a Michaels would never be among them. So the results have to be interpreted through this lens. And can only be a qualified achievement.
Zodiac (2007) a year before Iron Man, Robert Downey Jr. happens to costar with Mark Ruffalo in this David Fincher film that actually pivots on Jake Gyllenhaal’s conviction that he solved the mystery of the identity of the notorious killer. This is another rewatch I needed to do, because I hadn’t previously managed to stay awake through the whole thing, and in hindsight it’s another classic Hollywood movie that isn’t being made at the moment, filled with bona fide movie stars, but not necessarily at that time a cast that would really have been recognized, all three stars at different points in their careers. Actually, this might even have been the film that led RDJ to Iron Man.
I’m not diving in immediately back to the catalog, so this marks a bookmark in the project, and April will be the first time since last August material for this blog won’t be focused on it.
