The Majestic (2001)

Director: Frank Darabont

Cast: Jim Carrey, Martin Landau, Laurie Holden, David Ogden Stiers

Have I Seen It Before: Oh, sure. There was something always romantic about throwing away everything that had been holding you down before and just running the neighborhood movie theater for the rest of your days (I know… I know…) but like with most people, the movie sort of disappeared from my mind.

Did I Like It: This movie exists in a weird nether-region. It is unashamedly patriotic, and one would think it lucked out and came out at a brief, relatively impossible to predict moment where the national mood was similarly patriotic, but somehow it landed with an absolutely thud. Darabont’s other films didn’t exactly do gangbusters at the box office, but found their audiences later on after repeated airings on cable. TNT didn’t want anything to do with this film?

It’s a barely remembered footnote in Darabont’s career*, especially coming off of two of the more transcendent Stephen King adaptations in the canon, but it has that same trait that made those two earlier films such a success. It’s unabashedly the kind of movie that Frank Capra would make, if he were still making films in the 1990s or 2000s.

And still, America wants nothing to do with the film, TNT wants nothing to do with the film, and even I kind of lost track of the thing over the years. Why? Maybe some people were turned off by dramatic turn from Carrey that doesn’t default to his normal antics (even The Truman Show (1998), probably his best performance, has him occasionally tapping into the energies which made him a star in the first place), but I certainly wasn’t. I think it might be more to do with the fact that for all of its charms, it has none of the transcendent moments that made The Shawshank Redemption (1994) and The Green Mile (1999) the classics they were.

It’s just a nice little movie, and when you judge those by comparison, there’s always a bit lacking.

*By the way: Why doesn’t he get to work anymore? He gets booted from after making in my mind the only watchable episodes of The Walking Dead, Mob City doesn’t capture the imagination, and then he’s gone forever? The man made Shawshank and we just have no use for him? Now that I type that, I wonder if there is some larger problem keeping his work from us. Maybe I don’t want to know.

The X-Files (1998)

Director: Rob Bowman

Cast: David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson, Martin Landau, Blythe Danner

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. I think we’d struggle to find a movie in the summer of ‘98 that I didn’t see. The movie also coincided with the briefest of moments where I was super into the TV show while it was still airing.

Did I Like It: And my memory was that being completely immersed in the (ultimately filled with dead ends) mythology of the show was about the only way that this film would make any degree of sense. But after watching it again after all of these years, I’m struck by just how much the film does work on its own merits. Maybe I’m even more steeped in the lore of the show during this viewing, and all the little nods connect more than they did in the past. Perhaps this is a byproduct of living in an era where the predominant cinematic genre is the Marvel movie and their imitators.

I think its more likely that at its core, the film strives to be like Three Days of the Condor (1975) or The Parallax View (1974). The same might be said (and in fact, has probably been said with an almost nauseating frequency) about Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)>, but here the need to pay off the churning miasma of mythology is largely thrown away in favor of the chase.

Now, the more, I think about it, the reality is that since Chris Carter had no real sense with where he was going with his larger story, this is free to be a medium-impact late-90s thriller, which is precisely what the film needed to be. The Truth (or, at least, the full truth) was never out there, as it turned out, but the more self-contained an X-File is, the more enjoyable it is, and this film contains itself largely despite what one might expect.

Both of my seemingly conflicting thoughts are somehow true. See? Now I’m all turned around. Thanks, Chris Carter.

Ed Wood (1994)

Director: Tim Burton

Cast: Johnny Depp, Martin Landau, Sarah Jessica Parker, Patricia Arquette

Have I Seen it Before: Big time.

Did I Like It: If you’ve known me for any length of time, you’ve probably heard about my affinity for Tim Burton’s likely most famous film, Batman (1989). I’ve owned it in five different formats, and have probably watched it more than any other film in history…

But it isn’t my favorite Tim Burton film. Not by a long shot.

The story of Edward D. Wood, Jr. isn’t a very nice story. A man with not a lot of talent doesn’t let that stop him, he proceeds to make movies despite that lack of talent, and the pursuit of those dreams did not bring him fortune, or glory, or even some mild sense of fulfillment. They only exacerbated his alcoholism and left him to die in squalor.

But the film stops before any of the truly tragic realities of Wood’s life can creep into the frame (indeed, they are mentioned only in codas before the end credits). It is a story about hope springing eternal against all odds (and even reality). It’s uplifting, and it’s about friendship at its core. Johnny Depp is never more reserved (or, for that matter, better) than he is in the title role, and Landau’s well-deserved Oscar for his turn as an at-the-end-of-his-rope Bela Lugosi makes this Burton’s strangest and most personal film, when it really should lay claim to neither.

I’m not even all that weirded out that for one of the few times (the others being, naturally Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007) and oddly, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2016)) when Danny Elfman is not orchestrating the score for a Burton film. I mean, I’m a little weirded out, just not a lot.

Also, with the one two punch of Vincent D’Onofrio’s face and Maurice LaMarche’s voice, this film contains the most believable, fictional portrayal of Orson Welles on film.

That doesn’t just count for something; it counts for a great deal.

North by Northwest (1959)

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Cast: Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, Martin Landau

Have I Seen it Before: It’s one of those movies which, no matter how many times I’ve seen it, it feels like I haven’t seen it enough. 

Did I Like It: I usually try not to look at any other reviews of a movie before I write the review, but in this case I couldn’t help but notice the film’s Rotten Tomatoes rating of 99%.

Who could possibly bring themselves to give a negative review to North by Northwest? When I found out that the only dim view of the the film apparently comes from a contemporary review featured in The New Yorker, I seriously contemplated cancelling my subscription. The reviewer declared that with this film, Hitchcock had irretrievably descended into self-parody. One can’t help but wonder what he might have made of Psycho (1960). Bad takes can certainly have a shelf life...

How could anyone possibly not be head-over-heels in love with this movie? More moments from the aforementioned Psycho may have seeped into the collective cultural consciousness, but there’s a reason that every espionage thriller made after this film is helplessly trying to toil in its shadow. I’ve often said From Russia With Love (1963) is far away the best of the Bond movies (and that every Bond movie since is well-advised to reach for that standard), but even that peak of Bondanalia wants so desperately to be this movie, one can’t help but feel an inch of pity for it. Even a movie like Follow that Bird (1985) is built upon its back. Go watch it and tell me I’m wrong. My wife even thought I had been watching Batman (1966) from the other room, and honestly I can see the corollaries, and not just aurally. I could go on and on. 

Any film past its sixtieth birthday would be forgiven if parts were to have aged unfortunately, but no one seems to have given that permission to Hitchcock. Every second of tension locks into the viewer. Every joke in the film—and the film is deeply, deeply funny—still works and doesn’t sour after the wisecracks are now eligible to collect Social Security*.

It is a perfect Hollywood entertainment. As much as nearly every movie after it apes it in hopes of recapturing its magic, the movies were also originally created in hopes the form would be brought to full fruition with something like this.

*I don’t know how great I feel about that remark, but I digress...