North (1994)

Director: Rob Reiner

Cast: Elijah Wood, Jon Lovitz, Jason Alexander, Alan Arkin*

Have I Seen It Before: No. Sufficiently (perhaps justifiably) torpedoed upon release, the film simply didn’t have the ubiquity for we elder millennials to be watched, despite what Siskel and Ebert had to tell us.

I have seen the episode of Siskel & Ebert where they reviewed the film a handful of times.

Did I Like It: There’s a hope about the truly reviled films that if I were to view them, I would find the correct way to view it. I’d be the one that finally got what Reiner et. al were trying to do.

No such luck.

A story about a ten year old boy who—in the long line of films released in the period that I suspect Macaulay Culkin’s people turned down—masters something with which even adults struggle would, on spec, have at least some kind of charm.

It almost reaches that minimal point of joy, but never quite gets running. Unfortunately, Reiner and author/screenwriter Alan Zweibel have no ear for being a kid in the 1990s. Everything about this reads as someone in their 40s living in Brentwood trying to imitate the noises of a kid in the 1990s.

That would have yielded a movie with a discordant note about it, but unfortunately most of what isn’t North’s (Wood) inner life plays like the wheezing desperation of a Borscht Belt comic fifteen seconds away from the end of his career. Eskimos, Hawaiians, and a brief hit with the cast of Witness (1985). No one is safe from the most basic of potshots.

If those potshots were funny, then maybe I could take it all in as a guilty pleasure. Unfortunately, the only effective laugh is when one of the telephone operators answering questions about North says, without any additional context, “Don’t even get him started on the Warren Commission.”

All right, maybe Zweibel and and Reiner had one insight into the interior life of this ten-old-boy in 1994. Not enough to support an entire film, but they definitely got me there.

*Truly one of the more difficult movies to come up with a top cast. Willis should probably be in that top 4, right? It does make for a good hub to play variations of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.

The Rocketeer (1991)

Director: Joe Johnston

Cast: Bill Campbell, Alan Arkin, Jennifer Connelly, Timothy Dalton

Have I Seen It Before?: Oh, my goodness, yes.

Did I like it?: I haven’t seen The Rocketeer in at least five years, but I’ve probably seen it dozens upon dozens of times since it’s ill-fated release in 1991. Every single time I watch it, I’m floored by how much I am enamored of it. Such is the way when you re-visit one of your favorite films of all time.

Some might say it’s too much like the Indiana Jones films for its own good. I dare say it has an equal—if not even higher—spot in my heart than even Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). Some might say it’s too silly for its own good. Those people need to lighten up. Some might say it was too smart (with at least a pop-cultural sense of history) for the audience of children for whom it was intended. Those children could grow into the film. I know I did.

Along with Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990) it is quite possibly the film most influential to the work I do here on the site.

I love every performer in the film, from the guy who plays W.C. Fields (Bob Leeman) perfectly problematically (although, the camera work does most of the leering work here), all the way to the lady singing Cole Porter songs at the South Seas Club (in case you were wondering, she was Melora Hardin, which only makes her singing as Jan Levinson in The Office that much better).

I love the James Horner score so much that I very nearly considered canceling my Apple Music subscription when I realized they didn’t have it. When Disney Junior started airing a CGI series where Cliff Secord’s 7-year-old great-granddaughter takes to the skies as a new Rocketeer, I resented it at first, because the Rocketeer shouldn’t be for 7-year-olds, it should be for me. Then I realized I was 7 in 1991, so I got over it. Screw it, I may still watch it. It’s The Rocketeer, for pity’s sake.

I love this movie. If there are flaws in it, I cannot or will not see them. For my money, it is the single greatest thing currently on Disney+. It is objectively one of the top ten things on Disney+, and if you’re not watching it right now, I’m not sure what to do with you.