Speed (1994)

Director: Jan de Bont

Cast: Keanu Reeves, Sandra Bullock, Dennis Hopper, Jeff Daniels

Have I Seen it Before: Certainly. Several times. Hell, the title of one of my upcoming books is a reference to the film.

Did I Like It: We could fill the entire bandwidth of the various streaming services several times over with the clones of Die Hard (1988) that were produced in the ten-fifteen years after that film’s release. Many of them are truly bad. More than a few of them beg an investigation as to why they even exist in the first place.

Then there’s Speed.

Every piece of Speed fits together. That is not to say any moment of it is believable, but I have a hard time picking a moment from the film that feels incongruous with any of the other parts. One might say that the film really ends when the passengers get off the bus, and the movie definitely runs out of narrative when Howard Payne (Hopper—oh, sweet, sweet, Hopper*) loses his head. But these are nitpicks from a film that ages far better than some of the contemporary films, like The Rock (1996) or Bad Boys (1995), or really any of Michael Bay’s films, now that I’ve had a minute to think about it.

I will say that this film rests squarely in the least-engaging (although not entirely un-engaging) period in the screen career of Keanu Reeves. He has tried to shed the early exuberance of a Ted “Theodore” Logan, and is content to be merely earnest as all get-out. He’ll work through this period and become the shy near-Buddha we all know and love today, but is any character in an action movie from this era anything more than a prop designed to move plot forward? Just ask Jason Patric.

*Come to think of it, both of my upcoming books have some pretty direct lines into this movie. Maybe in the far flung future, people will refer to this as my “Dennis Hopper period” and be supremely disappointed when they realize what that really means.

Hemingway (2021)

Director: Ken Burns, Lynn Novick

Cast: Jeff Daniels, Patricia Clarkson, Mary-Louise Parker, Keri Russell

Have I Seen it Before: No, at the time of this writing, the film is brand new. Is this my first review of a movie released in 2021? Looking over the records, I did post a review of Zack Synder’s Justice League (2021), but as I had no capacity to review such a thing, Lora wrote that review.

Did I Like It: And that should be pretty telling. I’m not sure at what point the prospect of spending four hours with superheroes became a chore, and the opportunity of spending 6 hours with a man of letters who was gleefully awful even to those closest to him. I must have become so fussy.

I realize I have reviewed very few documentaries here on the site. I’ve been watching a lot of them, but as they are part of screening duties for a festival, reviews never find their way here. Gene Siskel said once—and my memory fails, he might have been quoting someone else—that he had long since come to prefer documentaries, as it would be time spent with a better class of people.

Documentaries—even flawed ones—will evade the essential phoniness which will weigh down even the greatest narrative films. And, thankfully, as this comes from Ken Burns, there is hardly a flaw to find. Is there a filmmaker who came onto the scene with Brooklyn Bridge (1982)* and became ubiquitous with the documentary form as of The Civil War (1990)**, and has maintained that level of craft throughout nearly forty years? If there is such a master, their name escapes me.

And yet, am I spending time with a better class of person? The reams of words written—and for that matter, the hours of footage displayed—about Hemingway’s failings are too numerous to have any hope to contribute anything new here. He was a brute, a drunk, and in the last years of his life a hateful paranoiac. You can’t dismiss any of that because he knew how to put together an English sentence. Can you contextualize the man’s flaws and still appreciate the work? 

There are three types of failed people where the question of whether the work still has value despite their less-desirable traits. 

There are those whose political beliefs become—or always were odious. Think someone like Frank Miller. Hemingway’s politics were incidental, but in action nearly always to the left, or at the very least anti-facist.

There are those whose behavior is so fundamentally wrong, that even the work becomes revolting in retrospect. Think Woody Allen. If any of his wives, or his children, or F. Scott Fitzgerald were still alive, I think they would have a legitimate beef. Otherwise, I am willing to label being an asshole in the abstract as a venal rather than mortal sin.

Then there are those who wished to be good, but due to being felled by alcoholism, multiple concussions, and the general makeup of human failures, never succeed in being the good men they would have wished. This is Hemingway. A failure. The film is an inspiration and a cautionary tale in equal measure.

*Which—if I’ve seen it—I have since tragically forgotten it. Must make a point to track it down. With my new account with PBS.org, maybe that will be within reach.

**Which I’m nearly always up for re-watching.

Steve Jobs (2015)

Director: Danny Boyle

Cast: Michael Fassbender, Kate Winslet, Seth Rogen, Jeff Daniels

Have I Seen it Before: Yes. Hell, I’ve read the book it was (loosely) based on twice.

Did I Like It: It feels like my opinion about the film seems like a fait accompli dependent on the answer to two questions:

1)     How do I feel about Steve Jobs (Fassbender) and the company he created going into the film?

2)     How do I feel about the work of Aaron Sorkin?

The answer to the second question is I enthusiastically love Sorkin’s work. I have no problem with The Newsroom, and I even like Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, if you manage to ignore the last five episodes or so. Even if he’s starting to repeat himself a little bit and has never quite been as sharp as he was before he sobered up, I watch anything he has written, and I suddenly want to work harder at everything I do. Some people have some track of music or a particular recording artist to get them pumped, I have Sorkin.

Here, he has constructed a film story that reflects the products made by its subjects. Splitting a basic three-act structure across three of Jobs’ product launches, it bobs and weaves through many of the idea introduced in the Walter Isaacson biography upon which it is based. It was the only way to fit the essence of the book and the man into the confined package of a prestige drama. Sure, it creates fictions throughout that narrative, and in a vain attempt to make Jobs a gentler soul end the film at an arbitrary point in its central relationship. These are the realities of the biopic, even when it’s difficult to call this a biopic when it barely glances at the pre-Macintosh Jobs and only hints at the things he will do in the last decade of his life.

Which brings us to an attempt to answer that first question I mentioned above. Steve Wozniak (Rogen) may be the tragic, doomed hero of the piece, imploring his old friend that he can be gifted and kind. For a moment—as I indicated above—that it artificially seems like the lout Jobs was throughout the film may have found that his heart grew two sizes just before the launch of the iMac, but the reality and the text indicates he remained prickly and often hard to deal with for the rest of his life. The man didn’t really change, and he didn’t really mellow, but that’s not what the film is about. To watch him terrorize his colleagues is entertaining in and of itself, but I’m not sure I would have wanted to know the man personally.

Then again, I am typing this review on an iMac, so what do I know? He was probably right.