School Daze (Spike Lee, 1988)

Cast: Laurence Fishburne, Giancarlo Esposito, Spike Lee, Tisha Campbell, Kyme, Joe Seneca, Ellen Holly, Ossie Davis, Bill Nunn, James Bond III, Branford Marsalis, Kadeem Hardison, Samuel L. Jackson. Screenplay: Spike Lee. Cinematography: Ernest R. Dickerson. Production design: Wynn Thomas. Film editing: Barry Alexander Brown. Music: Bill Lee. 

Event Horizon (Paul W.S. Anderson, 1997)

 

Event Horizon (Paul W.S. Anderson, 1997)

Cast: Laurence Fishburne, Sam Neill, Kathleen Quinlan, Joely Richardson, Richard T. Jones, Jason Isaacs, Jack Noseworthy, Sean Pertwee. Screenplay: Philip Eisner. Cinematography: Adrian Biddle. Production design: Joseph Bennett. Film editing: Martin Hunter. Music: Michael Kamen, Orbital. 

The makers of Event Horizon made the same mistake as the makers of the classics 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) and Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), that of assuming the exploration of space would continue unabated, so they set their movies in the early 21st century. In Event Horizon, for example, we’re told that the first moon base was established in 2017, and the rescue of a ship in the orbit of Neptune is occurring just 30 years later. (One reason I admire the TV series For All Mankind is that it intentionally plays out as alternate history, in which the space race with the Soviet Union got a boost when the commies landed on the moon before the Americans.) But that’s only a quibble, because mainly Event Horizon is a mess. A scary mess, to be sure, one to be watched for thrills, not for consistency or even plausible sci-fi. Some of the mess is the result of interference from Paramount, the releasing company, which was afraid that James Cameron wouldn’t finish Titanic in time for its scheduled release, so it put pressure on the producers of Event Horizon to get it done quick and dirty. The movie has since developed cult status, and there have been rumors that Paul W.S. Anderson has a director’s cut that would smooth out all the roughness of what was released. Those have remained rumors. I don’t think any cut is going to solve the fundamental problems of Event Horizon, that it doesn’t give fine actors like Laurence Fishburne and Sam Neill solid enough characters to play, and that the central menace – something that happened to the titular ship when it was thrust into another dimension – is so vague. The crew of the Lewis and Clark, the rescue ship, is terrified by hallucinations drawn from the darkest moments of their lives. Something is causing these nightmare visions, but it’s never made clear exactly what. Moreover, they keep telling each other that “it’s all in your head,“ which is the kind of non-reassurance that I thought most of us had outgrown. Still, as I said, Event Horizon is scary if you don’t think too much about it, which may be enough for some.

Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)

Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now

Capt. Willard: Martin Sheen
Col. Kurtz: Marlon Brando
Lt. Col. Kilgore: Robert Duvall
Jay "Chef" Hicks: Frederic Forrest
Lance B. Johnson: Sam Bottoms
Tyrone "Clean" Miller: Laurence Fishburne
Chief Phillips: Albert Hall
Col Lucas: Harrison Ford
Photojournalist: Dennis Hopper

Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Screenplay: John Milius, Francis Ford Coppola, Michael Herr
Based on a novel by Joseph Conrad
Cinematography: Vittorio Storaro
Production design: Dean Tavoularis
Film editing: Lisa Fruchtman, Gerald B. Greenberg, Walter Murch

The familiar story of the confused and sometimes disastrous making of Apocalypse Now has been told many times, and never better than by Francis Ford Coppola's wife, Eleanor, in her 1991 documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse. So it's not worth going into here, except to note that the subtitle of her film plays on both the current meaning of the word "apocalypse" -- i.e., a disaster of great magnitude -- and the original one: a disclosure or revelation. It might be said that the enormous expenditure and hardship that Francis Coppola experienced during the making of Apocalypse Now was revelatory, not only to Coppola but also to the film industry, which was reaching the limits of its tolerance of unconstrained visionary filmmaking. It would cross that limit the following year with Heaven's Gate, Michael Cimino's film that took down a venerable production force, United Artists, along with its director. Coppola's career, unlike Cimino's, would recover, but he would never again be the director he was in his prime, with the first two Godfather films. And American filmmaking would never again be as prone to take risks as it was in the 1970s. As for the film itself, Apocalypse Now remains one of the essential American movies if only because it epitomizes the nightmare that was the Vietnam War. Coppola deserves much of the credit for this embodiment of Lord Acton's familiar dictum: "Power tends to corrupt. Absolute power corrupts absolutely." But there are others who should share the credit with him, including screenwriters John Milius and Michael Herr, who made the connection between Joseph Conrad's tale of imperialism gone wrong, Heart of Darkness, and the war. The ambience of the film is largely the work of production designer Dean Tavoularis, cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, who won a well-deserved Oscar, and Walter Murch and his sound team, who also won. And while Marlon Brando's Kurtz is a disappointment and Martin Sheen never quite meets the demands of his role as Capt. Willard, they are surrounded by marvelous support from Robert Duvall, Frederic Forrest, Dennis Hopper, and a very young and almost unrecognizable Laurence Fishburne (billed as Larry), among others.

Mission: Impossible III (J.J. Abrams, 2006)

I gave up on the Mission: Impossible series after the first two installments (Brian De Palma, 1996; John Woo, 2000) partly because they featured the world's most annoying major movie star, but also because they lacked some of the things that made the old TV series so entertaining. One of those things is intelligence, by which I mean not just spycraft but also the application of thought, rather than muscle and firepower, to problem-solving. Another is that the TV show was an ensemble affair, with Peter Graves, Martin Landau, Barbara Bain, Greg Morris, and Peter Lupus (and various successors) working together to thwart the bad guys. The films, on the other hand, were very much about Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) as a James Bond-style one-man band -- no surprise, since Cruise is the producer of the M:I movies. The other members of the Impossible Missions Force were expendable, with the exception of Ving Rhames, who has been the only other constant in the film series. I was persuaded to take another look at the series after I found myself enjoying Edge of Tomorrow (Doug Liman, 2014), which made me think that Cruise still had some valid claim to his stardom. And since J.J. Abrams has become maybe the world's most successful producer-writer-director, it also behooved me to check out the first film he directed. Abrams made a laudable effort to restore some of the ensemble work of the TV series, bringing on a team including Rhames, Billy Crudup, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Maggie Q, Simon Pegg, and Laurence Fishburne to flesh out the IMF. It doesn't quite work because Cruise still hogs the film, but there are some good bits from all of the supporting actors, and a nice contribution to IMF lore: the souped-up 3-D printer that churns out one of the famous masks the agents wind up wearing. This time it's a mask of the film's villain, Owen Davian (Philip Seymour Hoffman), and one of the best scenes in the film involves Hoffman playing Cruise playing Hoffman. But there are simply too many climaxes to the movie. I wish some of them had been cut to expand on the film's most enjoyable section, in which the team infiltrates the Vatican to kidnap Davian. I would have liked to see the planning -- the intelligence, if you will -- that went into the scheme. But I liked M:I III more than I expected. I'm told that Mission: Impossible -- Ghost Protocol (Brad Bird, 2011) and Mission: Impossible -- Rogue Nation (Christopher McQuarrie, 2015) are better, so maybe I'll eventually get around to checking them out.