Hook (1991)

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Robin Williams, Dustin Hoffman, Julia Roberts, Bob Hoskins

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. I remember having the full action figure line and the Happy Meal toys on this one.

Was I the only one?

Did I Like It: With Spielberg making the rounds plugging Disclosure Day (2026), I’ve got to again listen to him occasionally dump on his own work here. He says he lacked much confidence in the second act of the film, and that feels right. The first half hour of the film may not make a whole lot of sense*, but the kidnapping of Pan’s (Williams, just maybe the role he was born to play; pity the script wasn’t a hair tighter) kids was sufficiently terrifying to stick in my head 35 years later.

That terror deflates like a punctured balloon by the time anyone gets to Neverland (which feels like it happens about an hour into things, which is its own problem) Hook is less some demented creature that will definitely take me away in the middle of the night, and just some clown dominated by decades—even centuries—of anxieties, resentments, and neurosis. Even if Spielberg never intended the message, or even if he couldn’t quite articulate it to his satisfaction, there is a a profound child-like fantasy at play here, and one that might just turn out to be true:

It’s the scariest of adults who are unavoidably the most pathetic creatures you’re bound to find out there in the world.

*If Hook (Hoffman, so wildly unrecognizable in the role that I was probably in my twenties before I realized the Captain and Rain Man are the same guy) could always just pop up in Wendy’s (Maggie Smith) bedroom, doesn’t that mean that the Neverlands Pirates could pretty much go anywhere they want to and make Pan’s life a perpetualy living hell?

All the President's Men (1976)

Director: Alan J. Pakula

Cast: Dustin Hoffman, Robert Redford, Jack Warden, Jason Robards

Have I Seen It Before: Oh, sure.

Did I Like It: There’s a genre of storytelling that is really starting to piss me off. Siskel often lamented that it was being depicted with less and less frequency in American cinema, as it was quickly—post Star Wars – Episode IV: A New Hope (1977)—committing all of its A-level resources to material which in the past would have been relegated to b-pictures*. Sorkin almost exclusively trucks in it. This movie is an absolute master’s survey of it (to the point where I’m thinking it almost has to be one of the pillars of influence for Mr. Sorkin) .

It is a type of story that involves very real heroism, but of a cerebral sort. Here, it’s framed as a detective story. Although we already know whodunit, and rather notably so, the tension is maintained. How? It lies almost exclusively in the fact that this is a story about people—adults, even when some of their flaws come into full bloom—who are passionate about their work, and their work is objectively important.

It makes one want to feel passionately about their own work. In truth, it makes one long for work that might actually matter. I’m so sick to death of it, and I can’t get enough of it.

*One can only wonder what—had he lived—the tall, skinny one might have thought about the current condition of the movies. You, dear reader, might be heartened by some recent failures in the superhero genre and think that things are going to go back to normal. I would imagine it won’t. The superhero is going nowhere, it’s just that studios will stop green-lighting movies which will balloon in costs to 300 million. Not every release can be The Avengers (2012).