Released after “The Godfather” in 1972, the same year as “The Godfather II” in 1974, and five years prior to “Apocalypse Now,” “The Conversation” represents one of four bona fide masterpieces writer/director Francis Ford Coppola brought to the screen during his incredible run throughout the 1970s. This low-key, character driven thriller might be the least famous title on that esteemed list, but it is more than worthy to be remembered among them.

The Mighty Gene Hackman plays Harry Caul, a San Francisco-based surveillance expert willing to take most any job that pays well. Harry never questions his employers because he doesn’t want the answers. You give him the job and he’ll give you the tape. It’s all very simple and clean… until it isn’t.

Though he moved a couple thousand miles away, the one thing Harry can’t escape is his past. Somebody was killed once upon a time, and Harry isn’t about to allow himself to shoulder the blame. But this devout Catholic is punishing himself, probably without even realizing it. He lives alone, is alone and he’s only willing to let himself get as close to someone as his suspicions and guilt will allow — which isn’t very close at all.

Harry’s latest job seems simple enough. All he’s been asked to do is record a young couple’s conversation as they stroll through a busy park during the workday lunch hour. This is the easy part for a man known as the best in his profession. A microphone here, a microphone there, put it all together and what you have at first appears to be a rather innocuous and even dull conversation. The difficult part comes later.

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JAVIER BARDEM IS BOND 23′S VILLAIN

This is good news. Bardem is a larger-than-life presence on the screen and Bond could use some larger-than-lifeness — especially if all that larger-than-lifeness is filmed on a tripod.

GENE HACKMAN TO COME OUT OF RETIREMENT?

Somewhere around 1983, Gene Hackman became my favorite living actor and remained so until his 2004 retirement (Michael Caine now owns that spot). Last I heard, The Mighty Gene Hackman is loving life somewhere in Arizona, where at the age of 81 he paints and writes.

I’d like to– No, I want to always remember Hackman as the epitome of everyday masculinity that he portrayed so brilliantly in every film regardless of the role. I don’t want to see him old and frail. Today he might be as strong and vibrant as Robert Duvall is at the age of 80, but if he’s not I don’t want to know about it.

This is why I refuse to see “Ragtime.” I simply cannot bear the thought of The Mighty Jimmy Cagney as an old man and won’t put myself through it.

TARANTINO CASTS DON JOHNSON AS PLANTATION OWNER PIMP IN ‘DJANGO’

What a superb piece of casting. With better script choices I’m almost positive Johnson could’ve been the movie star he deserved to be. You want to see an underrated pulper that thanks to Johnson’s hangdog performance deserves a bigger audience…?

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I had never heard of the French filmmaker Eric Rohmer until his death at the age of 90 last year. I was surprised to find him mentioned in a positive light in the conservative journals I regularly peruse. 

The best known works in his canon were his “Six Moral Tales” cycle, six films all related in theme made between 1963 and 1972. The first film, only 23 minutes long, was simply shot in grainy black and white and looked like it was shot on a student film budget. Each successive film contains a better script, better acting, and better production value. Rohmer, at the time, was considered a part of the French “New Wave” cinema crowd, although from what I have since read, his “Moral Tales” cycle made him an outcast to some, while others say he stayed truer to the ideals of the movement than his counterparts. 

Each of these films explores the same theme: an attached man, married or otherwise, struggles with the moral dilemma created by desire. There’s hardly any sex shown in these films, but it permeates the minds of the characters, and therefore the viewer, at the deepest levels.

All of these films are sparse, with no music or score, with incessant philosophical and subtitled dialogue. (There’s a famous line in the 1975 movie “Night Moves”, where Gene Hackman’s character says: “I saw a Rohmer movie once. It was like watching paint dry.” Maybe if you’re not paying attention to the thoughts of the characters in his movies

Most scenes are shot from only one camera position with no cuts, giving a feeling of voyeurism into the most intimate thoughts and desires of the (mostly) male characters. It’s rare to see a filmmaker so perfectly capture the male mind and ego, and in a way that’s timeless, despite the setting of Paris in the go-go mid-60s to early 70s. His are moral characters, but ones who are deeply conflicted and torn between desire, jealousy, curiosity, and ego. In the last of the films, the lead male character imagines he wears a special pendant giving him the power to immediately seduce any woman he meets, including scaring off any potential male rivals.

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I’m realizing how odd it is to complain about the Oscars or to pigeonhole the Academy’s tastes. They can get it astoundingly right (i.e., I can agree wholeheartedly) and wildly wrong (i.e., I disagree) all in the same year in the same categories. Case in point…

1992:

“Unforgiven” – Yes, yes, yes. This is a great movie. Spot on. Finally, some recognition for Clint, who by this point had been awesome for, oh, twenty some odd years — but welcome to the party, Academy.

“The Crying Game” – Oh. Okay. It’s a good movie, kind of defined by the twist. I liked the movie, but the marketing campaign — in which Miramax told us there was a big twist — was egregious and perhaps evil.

“Howard’s End” – Oh, dear Lord I hate Merchant-Ivory movies. Not my cup of tea, but right up the Academy’s collective alley. Wikipedia says it was the first film to be released by Sony Pictures Classics, so named because Sony Important and Destined to Be Remembered Forever Films sounded too presumptuous.

“A Few Good Men” – Really loved this back then, the dialogue, the speech, and Tom Cruise’s performance. And while I still enjoy it, it’s not as good as I thought it was.

“Scent of a Woman” – Ugh, are you serious, Academy? Obviously I’m not the first to point this out, but this was the turning point for Pacino, when he decided to start sentences in his normal, gravelly voice and then to SHOUT THE REST OF THE SENTENCE LIKE THIS. It’s really annoying but he was RE-WARDED! WITH AN OSCAR! (more…)

In the Age of the Hollywood Sucker Punch, betting your time and dollars on movies and TV is more perilous than ever.

As often as not, you can expect to fork over $20-$40 at the theater expecting to laugh, cry, and be entertained. . .

. . . only to find yourself trapped in a widescreen, 3D, surround sound, stadium-seated liberal indoctrination chamber.

With TV, you can dedicate months and years to becoming a dedicated fan of a series. . .

. . . only to suddenly start getting lectured on what creeps you and your family are by dint of your politics/religion/gender/race/fill-in-the-blank.

Closing in on two years patrolling the mean streets, Big Hollywood already has dozens of posts that document these lies, cheap shots, and propaganda in grim detail. Amidst the cultural carnage conservatives step ever more gingerly, sifting through the rubble for scraps worth investing in.

One way most of us navigate this minefield is by discerning which actors — big, well-known, picture-opening actors — are worth trusting on name alone. No one has a perfect record, but the best gain our confidence by routinely choosing projects that hew to some modicum of quality, decency, and fair play. You may not agree with the underlying message or political slant of their movies, but that’s not the point — it’s completely possible for conservatives to love great liberal movies and vice versa. Rather, these actors convince us over the course of their careers that they aren’t likely to sucker punch their fans, or to embarrass their country, profession, or family by allowing politics and prejudices to tarnish their public reputations and filmed entertainments. (more…)

A sports film that is almost entirely about losers?!

About that oft forgotten and abandoned piece of real estate called Indiana?!

It’s shot in a landscape-portrait, documentary style that memorializes a smaller than small town high school, basketball team?!

A movie suspended in a repeatedly evangelical universe that counts prayer as the major source of miracles?!

That set of profoundly un-Hollywood ideas had me thanking God for them as I watched ‘Hoosiers’ today.

Hadn’t I seen it before?

Well, portions of it.

That, however, was when I was merely on my way to one of the great fast-tracks for losers, full-blown alcoholism.

At that time, I was in too much of a hurry to contemplate even the possibility of being a loser. (more…)

By Christmas of 1964, nowhere was safe for thirty-four-year-old Sean Connery.

It started with the fan letters — fifteen hundred per week. Then came the mobs rushing gates at movie premieres and personal appearances — screaming, fainting, tearing at his clothes, all demanding time, autographs, kisses, and more. Soon, even walking down the street incognito or taking his family out to dinner became perilous endeavors.

“The whole damn thing took over,” said his then-wife, the Academy-Award nominated actress Diane Cilento. “He really didn’t know who he was. People would call over to him things like, ‘Hey, Bondy, where’re you off to next?’ or ‘See any Soviet agents lately?’ It became impossible to have any sort of life. . . .It got madder and madder with each film.”

Every time it looked as if matters couldn’t get any worse, they did. In Tokyo (where they greeted him with screams of  “Bondo!”) Connery was using a bathroom urinal when he heard a quiet click. Startled, he glanced up to see a Japanese photographer peeking around his shoulder with a Nikon. On another occasion, after graciously signing his name for an elderly lady at the airport, she reacted with a look of horror. “No, no!” she said, “I wanted James Bond.” Director Terence Young, who was with Connery, remembers that “Sean sort of crumpled. It suddenly occurred to him that he was no longer a human being, he was a symbol.” (more…)

It always impresses me when an aged actor manages a comeback that is authentic, one based on more than mere nostalgia, one appealing to an entirely new generation of moviegoers. Jackie Gleason spent most of the 1970s appearing in pale television retreads of his 1950s heyday, and for most of that time he was absent from the big screen entirely. A revered comedic master, yes — but nevertheless his career as an innovator and taste-maker seemed long over. Then came Smokey and the Bandit, a fitting capstone to a long career of memorable portrayals and endless belly-laughs.

Born in 1916 in Brooklyn, Gleason was no stranger to tragedy. His sickly brother died when he was three, and his mother died when he was nineteen. But it was his father vanishing that gouged the biggest hole in his soul. “I was about nine when one day my pop didn’t come home,” Gleason said in later years. “A few days before, my mom and he had a violent argument and he took every picture out of the house that had him in it. That should have been the tip-off, but I was too young to know.” (more…)

Quietly, with dignity and without fanfare, The Mighty Gene Hackman retired from acting in 2004 to live with his wife in New Mexico and tap out the occasional novel, his latest being “Escape From Andersonville,” a piece of historical fiction he co-wrote with Daniel Lenihan.

Though there were no announcements I’m aware of, almost immediately I knew he had retired … because almost immediately there was a disturbance in the force. Sometime during the early eighties, Hackman replaced John Wayne as my favorite working actor and rarely did a year pass without a new Gene Hackman movie – and sometimes there were as many as two or three. So when the movies stopped coming, something just felt off.  (more…)

Betrayed by Liberal Hollywood

Psychologists say that a parent’s grief over the death of a child is “the most difficult loss to endure and surely among the most difficult to integrate into one’s life” because our children are an enormous part of our legacy, and “in their deaths, a large part of our own future dies.”  The natural order of our lives has been turned upside down, bringing on an emotional chaos.

For the parents of military men and women who have died after volunteering to serve their country and walking into the face of death in the 21^st century’s war on terror, this grief and chaos has been exponentially multiplied by liberal Hollywood.  But one has to actually walk this path to understand it.  The anti-war sentiment and films that have spewed from liberal actors, producers, and directors have burdened our hearts unspeakably as they have served only to aide the greatest enemy our country has ever faced and to deface and demoralize the greatest ambassadors our country has: the men and women who wear the uniforms of the United States military. (more…)

Over the weekend, I was pondering why the low budget, standard genre pic The Haunting in Connecticut (Lionsgate) has become a nifty little box office hit. The film added almost $9.5M over the weekend for a new 10-day cume of $37M, and the only conclusion I have been able to reach is that it’s all about the poster.

Creepy, right? I have not seen Haunting and will probably wait for DVD or pay cable, but that is a weird, startling, attention-grabbing image. As a movie junkie, I love good movie art. The best movie posters are evocative. They capture what a movie is all about without giving away the mystery. There are certain movie posters that instantly put me back in that theatre experiencing the film for the very first time. The best movie posters are not just promotional tools. They stand as a work of art on their own. These are my favorites, buit it is by no means a definitive list. Feel free to add your favorites (and subtract any of mine).

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