Die Hard

Die Hard is the best action movie that I have ever seen.

Bruce Willis does well as John McClane, a New York cop who recently separated from his wife because of her desire to pursue a job opportunity in Los Angeles. McClane travels to L.A. to visit her over the Christmas holiday. He arrives at her office party in a fancy high rise building, when "terrorists" break in and take the lot hostage.

John manages to escape, and then wages war on the hostage takers, thwarting their plans and picking them off one by one. Almost the entire movies takes place inside the sky scraper or immediately outside of it.

My favorite character in the movie is Hans Gruber, the leader of the bad guys. The actor who plays him, Alan Rickman, is also one of my favorites. I enjoy watching Rickman's performances as Severus Snape in the Harry Potter movies.

Die Hard has a plausible story line, moments of great humor, and is stylistically directed by John McTiernan. It is interesting that McTiernan often has the bad guys speaking in a foreign language, but no translation is provided. Also, he deliberately allowed light flares on the camera lens in some scenes to stay in the final version of the movie. "Ode to Joy" by Beethoven plays at various points throughout the film, and the "joy" of this adventure is an important theme.

Two key features of this film make it superior to other action movies. First is the character development of the antagonists such as Hans Gruber (the leader of the bad guys) and his main strong arm, Karl (played by the late Alexander Godunov).

We get to know Hans pretty well. He is highly intelligent, and it is important to him that others understand that he is highly intelligent and cultured.

Karl is a competent, efficient killer who goes on a maniacal rampage when he learns that McClane has killed his brother.

The other important feature is that the bad guys are not in fact, terrorists.

The movie audience is led to believe they are in one of my favorite scenes when the party-goers inside the high rise are first taken hostage. As machine guns are fired into the air and people scream, Hans calms the crowd.

I love, Rickman's slow, polished, deliberate delivery of Gruber's lines as chaos is all around him. He holds a book and acts as if he reads from it:

"Ladies and gentlemen... Ladies and gentlemen... due to the
Nakatomi Corporation's legacy of
greed around the globe, it is about
to be taught a lesson in real power.
You will be witnesses."

He closes the book.

But the bad guys are thieves, not terrorists. If they had in fact been terrorists with a political agenda, the "joy" theme in the movie would not work. Instead, they are after money, to which everyone can relate. The audience can feel all right about liking some qualities of the bad guys, at laughing at them or with them during the humorous parts of the movie.

Another one of my favorite lines from Hans is when McClane's wife, Holly (played by Bonnie Bedalia), who is also a hostage, discovers that the bad guys are not terrorists.

HOLLY
(to Hans, scornfully)
After all your posturing, all your
speeches...you're nothing but a common
thief.

Hans lunges at her.

HANS
I'm an exceptional thief, Mrs. McClane.
And now that I'm moving up to kidnapping,
you should be more polite.

Die Hard is a movie where one can see the effort that the director, the actors, the set designers, the special effects coordinators, and everyone put into making it successful as a work of art.

Their efforts paid off. I can't speak for the sequels, but the original Die Hard is a great movie.

Dumb and Dumber

Dumb and Dumber, along with Airplane, is the one of the two funniest movies that I have ever seen.

The comedy of Dumb and Dumber is similar to that of The Three Stooges- screwball adolescent humor.

But as I have heard it said by others, it is rare to find a guy who does not like The Three Stooges. On the other hand, it is hard to find a woman who does like them.

When I was a teenager, mom asked me why I liked that movie so much, and I told her that I could sort of identify with the characters.

"Oh no!" she exclaimed.

The movie works for a number or reasons. The writing is solid and keeps the gags coming at a brisk pace, from the opening scene of a beautiful lady waiting by a sign that says "Hope Street," followed underneath by another sign indicating no parking, to the last scene where Harry and Lloyd are completely oblivious to the opportunity they just missed to work with a bus load of beautiful women.

The music soundtrack is also great.

But what really makes the movie unique is the performance of Jim Carrey. His physical comedy abilities are special.

There are points where his face seems to be made of rubber or some substance that can be molded into expressions otherwise only possible on cartoon characters.

The elasticity of his movements is hilarious. In one scene, he has to start a tiny moped-like vehicle, his "Hog," as he calls it, with a pull cord- as one might start a push lawn mower.

The way he dramatically yanks the cord cracks me up every time.

I suppose age would reduce his ability to perform athletic feats like that, and unfortunately, I've not seen those expressions and movements from him in other films for a number of years.

It is my understanding that Carrey and Jeff Daniels have teamed up to work on a sequel to Dumb and Dumber. I hope it turns out well, but it will be a tremendous challenge for Carrey to reproduce this element that made the first film a success.

Gone With the Wind

Many people say that Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace is the best novel ever written.

Unfortunately, I've never attempted to read it. Perhaps one day.

Of the novels that I have read in my life, the best is Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell.

The film adaptation, directed by Victor Fleming, is also perhaps the best movie that I have ever seen.

The scale of this story is incredible. I often wonder how Mitchell's thought process worked in writing the book. Did she outline it all before she began writing, or did she just make it up as she went along, not knowing what turns the story would take?

I tend to believe it was the former, as I have heard that she worked backwards, writing the last chapter of the novel first, and the first chapter last.

It is unfortunate that she died after being stricken by a drunk driver in Atlanta at the age of 48. I would have liked to read other novels by her, and see if she would have attempted a sequel to Gone With The Wind.

There is so much to say about this movie. In this blog entry, I will just note the dynamism of some of the principal characters.

Most movies, good or bad, usually have only one or two dynamic characters. By dynamic, I mean a character who changes significantly in personality or attitude during the story. Static characters, on the other hand, remain the same.

Any easy example of a dynamic character is Ebeneezer Scrooge.

Perhaps I am wrong in my thinking, but I tend to believe that the Academy Award for Best Actor or Best Actress should go to an actor who portrayed a dynamic character, or at least a character that displays a wide range of thought or emotions.

The Best Supporting Actor Award can go to an actor who portrays a static character. Tommy Lee Jones won this award for his portrayal of Deputy U.S. Marshal Gerard in the movie, The Fugitive. Gerard, though he does eventually come to realize that the fugitive he hunts is innocent of the crime, is a static character.

In Gone With the Wind, almost every single one of the major characters are dynamic. The reason for this is the coming and going of the Civil War, which changed everything about the country and the people who lived during that time.

1) Gerald O'Hara (played by Thomas Mitchell) is fiery, bombastic Irishman and lord of the Tara Plantation in Georgia. He is the father of Scarlett, the protagonist of the story. The best thing to ever happen to Gerald is his marriage to Ellen. He is completely devoted to her and to the land. In truth, Ellen is the one who runs the plantation while Gerald spends much of his time horseback riding.

When the war comes, Sherman's army ravages the plantation and leaves it destitute. The house is allowed to remain standing only because it served as a headquarters for the Union army. The most devastating blow to Gerald, though, comes when Ellen dies from disease. This snaps his mind, and Scarlett has to take care of him and the plantation after the Yankees have come and gone.

2) Melanie Hamilton (played by Olivia de Havilland)is the most virtuous character in the entire story. She is the object of Scarlett's jealousy and contempt because of her marriage to Ashley Wilkes, whom Scarlett wants for herself. Scarlett attempts to hide her feelings from Melanie, and she is successful largely because Melanie refuses to believe that her friend Scarlett would ever betray her or act so dishonorably. If the war had not come, Melanie and Ashley would have lived happily on their own plantation, Twelve Oaks, in a sort of fairytale.

The war, and afterward reconstruction, make Melanie a much more worldly person. She is able to lie straight faced to a Yankee soldier when questioned on the whereabouts of her husband, and she hides her emotions and feelings even better than Scarlett in taking part in a masquerade to protect her husband and other men when they return from a raid that left Ashley wounded and Scarlett's own husband dead.

Though a tiny woman whose body and health are not strong, she shows incredible strength of character in supporting the Confederate cause, standing by her husband and her friend Scarlett when she hears rumors of an affair, and in bringing back Rhett Butler from the edge of insanity at the end of the story.

3) Ashley Wilkes (played by Leslie Howard) is the true Southern gentleman. Honor is the most important thing to him. He is also perhaps the most sentimental character in the story. At one point, he says that he would have freed the slaves at Twelve Oaks when his father died. However, I can not see how he would have been able to continue his lifestyle if he had freed his slaves. In this way, he reminds me of Thomas Jefferson, who also lived a bit of a hypocritical lifestyle in regard to his slaves. Ashley says that if the war had not come, he would have remained happily buried at Twelve Oaks.

But the war did come. "And now I find myself in a world which for me is worse than death," Ashley says. "A world in which there is no place for me." Indeed, in order to survive, he and his family move in with Scarlett at Tara plantation after the war. He also follows Scarlett into the lumber business after a flimsy plan to move to New York and become a banker is vetoed by his wife, Melanie.

Ashley's code of honor is a source of great frustration for Scarlett, and for that matter, Rhett Butler as well.

4) Rhett Butler (played by Clark Gable) is a handsome, strong and competent man who obtains success at just about anything he sets his mind to. His only interest is in himself, though. At the beginning of the movie, it is explained that he has a nasty reputation and is not "received" by any decent family in Charleston. By his own words he is not a "marrying man." He does not believe in the Southern cause and thinks it foolish to go to war, but he uses the war to amass a tremendous fortune through blockade running.

His mistake, or perhaps just something that happens to him which is out of his normal character, is when he falls in love with Scarlett. His feelings for Scarlett are what cause the real problems in his life and changes in his character, not the war.

He feels a pang of guilt once he sees that the South is finally going to lose the war, and he decides to join the army. However, his decision to join the Confederates really does not affect his world view or attitudes on life.

He convinces Scarlett to marry him, though they both know she is in love with Ashley. The marriage is not a happy one, despite all of the money they amass.

When Rhett and Scarlett have a child, Bonnie Blue Butler, that changes him. He becomes honorable and a pillar of the community for the sake of his daughter. When the daughter dies in a horse riding accident, it destroys him along with the affection that he felt for Scarlett, who still hopes to have Ashley. He locks himself in a room with his dead daughter, and it is Melanie Hamilton who goes in to talk to him, convince him to let his daughter be buried, and perhaps save him from suicide.

5) Scarlett O'Hara (played by Vivien Leigh) is one of the great characters in literary or film history. She has the combination of her father's feisty Irish personality, and the intelligence of her mother. As a young girl on the Tara plantation, her life consists of attending balls and parties. She is in love with Ashley Wilkes, who is going to marry Melanie Hamilton, and this is the only source of stress in her life.

When the war comes, though, all sorts of things happen that force Scarlett to adjust. She delivers Melanie's baby, a difficult childbirth, essentially by herself. She gets Melanie, the baby and her servant, Prissy, from Atlanta to her home at Tara, dodging the Union Army along the way. She begins to restore Tara after it has been all but completely destroyed by Sherman's Army. She takes care of her father, who has gone insane from the death of Ellen, his wife. She secretly kills and then buries a Union soldier. She marries a man whom she does not love to save Tara from being sold out for taxes. She becomes a businesswoman, to the shock of Southern society, and runs a profitable store and lumber business.

Scarlett is too vast a character to talk about in a few paragraphs. All of the characters above, along with ones I have not mentioned, are well developed and consistent throughout the story.

To write a novel with such characters, in the grand scale of the Civil War, is a spectacular accomplishment. To turn it into a film that stays true to the story is also an amazing feat.

Before I close, I should note one unfortunate thing about the Gone With the Wind saga.

It is not good that such a tremendous story has to come largely at the expense of African Americans. One of the best performances in the movie is from Hattie McDaniel, who plays Scarlett's "Mamie" or house servant. A favorite part of the movie for me is when Rhett Butler says that Mamie is one of the few people whose respect he would like to have. That is consistent with Rhett's character.

However, other blacks in the film are depicted as being simple minded and always in need of supervision from whites.

No matter how good the movie is, if I were an African American, I probably would not have much interest in studying this story or appreciating it. Life is just too short to spend time on art that degrades your people.

It is impossible to avoid the subject of blacks and slavery when writing a story of the South during the Civil War, though. Slavery was an evil that pervaded everything during that era.

Gone With the Wind is a movie that I enjoy, in spite of its depiction of blacks, for many reasons, including the dynamic quality of so many of the characters.


Nathan Marshburn

Lonesome Dove

Robert Duvall called the Lonesome Dove miniseries The Godfather of American Westerns.

Based on the Pulitzer Prize winning novel of the same name by Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove boasts quite a cast of talented actors: Duvall, Tommy Lee Jones, Danny Glover, Robert Urich, Diane Lane, Anjelica Huston, and even a young Steve Buscemi, to name some. The smaller roles, the character actors, do a superb job as well.

But it is the writing that makes Lonesome Dove such a great work of art. It is the writing that attracted that kind of acting talent.

Every once in a while in literature and in films, I come across a character from whom I can learn a great deal.

Augustus "Gus" McCrae (played by Robert Duvall) is one such character.

He has some of the best lines that I've ever heard in film, and I envy his ability to look at the bright and humorous side in even the most dire of situations. If I could adopt Gus's attitude by even a quarter, I would be a much more relaxed person.

In films with good writing, it is better to include an excerpt from the script, as opposed to just talking about how good the writing is. Unfortunately, I've not been able to find the script on line.

The plot is that Gus and his friend, Woodrow Call, are two former Texas Rangers who have retired to a desolate town on the Mexican Border called Lonesome Dove. After an old friend, Jake Spoon, who is on the run from an Arkansas sheriff, shows up in Lonesome Dove and tells the men about the beauty of the Montana territory that he has visited, Woodrow decides to raise a herd of cattle and drive them from Texas up to Montana. Several of the townsmen go with him, and they all get into a number of adventures along the way.

Though best friends, Woodrow and Gus have very different personalities, and they argue and banter back and forth quite a bit. Their conversations are illuminating entertainment. The story is full of memorable quotes, especially from Gus. You have to hear the quotes in the context of the story to really appreciate them, though.

The characters are so well thought out and so consistent, but at the same time possess rare qualities. Lonesome Dove, like all the movies I have reviewed thus far, is a work of art that I enjoy watching and studying again and again.

I agree with the above assessment of the miniseries from Robert Duvall. It is arguably the best Western ever put on film. Unforgiven with Clint Eastwood is in the conversation as well, from the Westerns that I have seen, but I would not disagree with anyone who put Lonesome Dove at the top of the list.

The Seventh Seal

The Seventh Seal is a film that I put in my top five of personal favorites. It is quite possibly the most powerful film that I have ever seen.

Directed by Ingmar Bergman, the movie is in Swedish. If you watch it, make sure to keep the Swedish language sound track and use English subtitles. I watched a dubbed over English version once, and it was horrible. The dubbed version did not match the subtitle translation at all. Some of the lines made no sense and were read without emotion or feel for timing. This version robbed the film of its power.

The script located at the International Movie Script Database is an even better translation than the subtitles on my DVD from the Criterion Collection. http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Seventh-Seal,-The.html

The Seventh Seal is the story of a knight and his squire, just returned from the crusades. Death, an actual character in the story, is about to take them. The knight engages in a game of chess with Death. As long as the game goes on, they will live.

An English professor at Western Carolina University, Dr. Terry Nienhuis, introduced me to this movie. We were only going to watch a clip of it in his film class. But when he stopped the movie and turned up the lights, I almost yelled at him, "What are you doing?"

I remember the look of surprise on his face. He gave a thumbs up and said, "Okay, we'll keep going with it."

The movie's themes probably speak more to me than others.

I was raised in a devoutly evangelical Christian home. The "evangelical" part is the key.

My memories of church and religion during my childhood, on through my teenage years, are not good ones. As a teenager, I began to have serious questions about what I was being told to believe. I began to look for a different set of answers than what I had been taught, which now seemed like no answers at all. Unfortunately, most of the time all I could manage was an expression of anger. I am sad to say that all of this alienated me from a lot of good people in a small town in North Carolina where I grew up.

This film, The Seventh Seal, framed my doubts and questions better than anything I had previously come across. The language is poetic, the images stark and startling.

As I got older, though, I began to understand the role of religion in giving people hope. The actual truth may just be too dark for us to fathom. As Patrick Swayze said in an interview not long before he died of pancreatic cancer, "Hope is a very fragile thing, in any person's life."

I've tried showing this film to others, and I've yet to meet anyone who appreciates it like I do. I don't know if they are consciously trying to avoid the ideas of the movie, or if it is a working of their subconscious mind, a sort of defense mode.

Dr. Nienhuis and I disagreed over the ending of the movie. He thought it was a happy ending, with rain washing away the tears of the principal characters. That was not my take, though Ingmar Bergman uses an exchange between the squire, the knight, and the knight's wife to give the best possible advice when they are standing at the edge with Death:

KNIGHT
From our darkness, we call out to Thee, Lord.
Have mercy on us because we are small and
frightened and ignorant.

JONS
(bitterly)
In the darkness where You are supposed to be,
where all of us probably are.... In the
darkness You will find no one to listen to Your
cries or be touched by Your sufferings. Wash
Your tears and mirror Yourself in Your
indifference.

KNIGHT
God, You who are somewhere, who must be
somewhere, have mercy upon us.

JONS
I could have given you an herb to purge you of
your worries about eternity. Now it seems to be
too late. But in any case, feel the immense
triumph of this last minute when you can still
roll your eyes and move your toes.

KARIN
Quiet, quiet.

JONS
I shall be silent, but under protest.

It is wonderful, wonderful dialogue- some of the best ever put on film in my opinion, and the story is full of such terrific writing. The earthy feel of the entire movie also seems true to what medieval times must have been like, though of course I would not know for certain.

I'll close this entry with another excerpt from the film. The knight, played by a young Max Von Sydow (he was only 26 at the time, though he looks older in the story), has stopped to have a meal in the countryside with a group of traveling actors. It is a brief respite from the knight's game of chess with Death.

I take it as a lesson on how to live my life.


KNIGHT
People are troubled by so much.

MIA
It's always better when one is two. Have you no
one of your own?

KNIGHT
Yes, I think I had someone.

MIA
And what is she doing now?

KNIGHT
I don't know.

MIA
You look so solemn. Was she your beloved?

KNIGHT
We were newly married and we played together.
We laughed a great deal. I wrote songs to her
eyes, to her nose, to her beautiful little
ears. We went hunting together and at night we
danced. The house was full of life ...

MIA
Do you want some more strawberries?

KNIGHT
(shakes his head)
Faith is a torment, did you know that? It is
like loving someone who is out there in the
darkness but never appears, no matter how
loudly you call.

MIA
I don't understand what you mean.

KNIGHT
Everything I've said seems meaningless and
unreal while I sit here with you and your
husband. How unimportant it all becomes
suddenly.

He takes the bowl of milk in his hand and drinks deeply from it several
times. Then he carefully puts it down and looks up, smiling.

MIA
Now you don't look so solemn.

KNIGHT
I shall remember this moment. The silence, the
twilight, the bowls of strawberries and milk,
your faces in the evening light. Mikael
sleeping, Jof with his lyre. I'll try to
remember what we have talked about. I'll carry
this memory between my hands as carefully as
if it were a bowl filled to the brim with fresh
milk.

He turns his face away and looks out towards the sea and the colorless gray
sky.

KNIGHT
And it will be an adequate sign -- it will be
enough for me.

He rises, nods to the others and walks down towards the forest. JOF continues
to play on his lyre. MIA stretches out on the grass.

The KNIGHT picks up his chess game and carries it towards the beach. It is
quiet and deserted; the sea is still.

Forrest Gump

It's quickly becoming apparent to me that all my movie reviews can begin to sound the same. I usually say this is a great film, otherwise I would not be reviewing it.

So from now on, I am going to try to hone in on just one or two aspects of the movie that struck me, to try and make this blog a little more interesting.

Forrest Gump is a story of American History in the mid to late 20th Century, as told through the life experiences of a mentally challenged young man from Alabama.

One of the many things that made this a great movie was Tom Hanks's voice and delivery as the title character.

Hanks had a certain way of adding a syllable at the end of a lot of his sentences and turning the tone upward, almost as if he was asking a question.

For example, when introducing himself, he often says, "My name is Forrest, Forrest Gu-ump."

The rest of his lines are delivered with a flatness that creates an overall impression of naivete, and of a challenged young man just trying to do the best he can and get along in the world.

Almost from the very beginning, Gump captures the interest and affection of the audience as he begins to tell the story of his life to random strangers who sit down beside him at a bus stop in Savannah, Georgia.

Hanks says that he got the idea for the voice of his character by basically mimicking the actor chosen to play Forrest Gump as a young boy (Michael Conner Humphreys). Humphreys is from Mississippi, and the way he spoke in the film is the way he talked in real life.

Hanks's facial expressions as Forrest Gump fit the voice, too. Very often he just has a plain, blank stare. At other times, as when he is running from bullies across a football field or when he is in a fire fight in Vietnam, the only thing betraying his emotions are eyes open wide in fear.

One of my favorite moments in the movie is his look of determination as he runs down a stadium tunnel at an Alabama football game. He was supposed to stop after he scored the touchdown, but he keeps on going. The camera shows him in slow motion in his football uniform, a look of stress on his face as he narrates, "Now, maybe it's just me, but college was very confusing times."

Forrest Gump is a story of my parents' generation. Chronologically, the movie ends in the early 1980s.

There is a young woman who listens to Forrest talk about his life for a while on the bus stop bench. She has a child with her.

Referring to the assassination attempt on Governor Wallace, she says, "I remember that, when Wallace got shot. I was in college."

My own mother was in college when Wallace was shot, and I would have been about the same age as the woman's child in that scene, at that time. One of the last historical events depicted in the movie is when President Reagan was shot, and that is my first public memory.

My parents both enjoy the movie except for when it switches to Vietnam, which does not bring back pleasant thoughts for them.

Forrest Gump is a great story for many other reasons. I would put it in my list of top ten best films ever made.

The Fugitive

Harrison Ford, when asked in an interview with Larry King what movie over the course of his career was actually better than he had hoped, he named The Fugitive.

For an idea of how The Fugitive could have turned out, one should watch the movie, The Package. It has the same director (Andrew Davis) and a large number of the same actors that appeared in The Fugitive.

The Package is not a bad movie. The Fugitive, however, is one of the better movies ever made.

Based on a TV series from the 1960s, it is the story of how a Chicago doctor, Richard Kimball (Harrison Ford) is wrongly accused and convicted of murdering his wife. He manages to escape from custody, and tries to find the real murderer of his wife, a one-armed man. Throughout his efforts, Kimball is relentlessly pursued by U.S. Marshal Samuel Gerard (Tommy Lee Jones). Jones won an academy award for his portrayal of this character.

While the makers of the movie had the basic idea for the story, Ford said that a lot of the script was improvised as they went along.

There is a scene toward the beginning of the movie where Dr. Kimball has gotten the drop on Deputy Gerard and is holding Gerard at gun point. In the original script, there was quite a bit of dialogue between the two men. Once they actually were shooting the scene, though, they gradually cut the dialogue down to Kimball yelling, "I didn't kill my wife!"

Gerard answers, "I don't care!"

In two sentences, this summed up the essence and the driving force of the tension in the movie.

The writing is concise, and almost every scene pushes the story forward and keeps the pace and suspense of the movie rolling. One really identifies with Kimball and all of the obstacles he has to overcome.

One also is fascinated by the (at times humorous) tenacity of Deputy Gerard and his unwillingness to let up one bit until he has his man, regardless of whether that man is guilty of the crime or not.

The film was released in 1993. The setting for most of the story is Chicago. The first part of the movie, however, was filmed in the mountains of North Carolina near my alma mater, Western Carolina University. The film department from the school helped out quite a bit with the movie, and one of my old professors, Al Wiggins, can be seen briefly in a role as a reporter.

In talking with Mr. Wiggins, who has acted in numerous films and TV shows, he originally had a speaking part. When asked by the film producers how much money he would like for this role, his response was "Talk to my agent."

He never heard back from them, and his lines were cut from the final version of the movie.

The filmmakers staged a massive train wreck in the town of Dillsboro, NC. At the time, it was one of the more elaborate stunts in film history. They had a real train collide at high speed with a bus and then de-rail.

When filming was done, they left some of the wreckage where it was.

I started school at Western in 1995, and one night I went with a group of college friends to check it out. As much as I remember the smashed up bus, I also remember a girl named Dorothy who went with us. She was cute and had just broken up with her boyfriend. She seemed sort of interested in me, but unfortunately, I really did not know how to handle that situation and she was soon gone.

The Fugitive was nominated for movie of the year. As I said, Tommy Lee Jones did a wonderful job as the unwaivering, dogged Deputy Gerard, and I believe this role opened many more doors for him even up to the present. His performance alone makes the movie worth watching.

The Fugitive is well directed, with solid dialogue and characters. It is a great drama/adventure story.

Nathan Marshburn