Sudden Impact

“It must make you feel good to make old, ugly things right again.” This is a line uttered halfway through Sudden Impact in response to artist Jennifer Spencer (Sondra Locke) who is restoring an old carousel on the pier. This line of dialogue also seems applicable to the film itself which was the first Dirty Harry film to be released in seven years, and the first to be officially directed by Eastwood. Sudden Impact is an attempt to not only revive the series but to also restore its reputation and...

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The Enforcer

It is inevitable that when something is as big a box office hit and cultural phenomena as Dirty Harry, that countless imitators and unnecessary cash-in sequels will follow. However, in 1973’s Magnum Force, Eastwood and co. sidestepped a lot of the pitfalls of the sequel to create a film with an intriguing idea that completely flipped the coin on Inspector Callahan, making him a more conflicted character while still adhering to his no-nonsense moral standards; you’re either right or you’re wrong...

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Magnum Force

The best thing about Magnum Force – aside from being one of those rare sequels that can more than hold its own – is that it gets the viewer to rethink and reassess the original Dirty Harry. It has a lot of the things we come to expect from the subgenre and from sequels in general: it tries to go bigger with its stunts and chases (which, really, the first film didn’t have), it’s a bit more bloated, and it has a lot of those cliché interactions between the rogue cop and his superiors. But it also...

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Dirty Harry

The controversy and cultural impact surrounding Don Siegel’s 1971 film is well documented. We all know about Pauline Kael’s quote and about the critical backlash against the film’s pro-gun, pro-vigilante point of view; however, what sometimes gets missed in all of that is the simple fact that Dirty Harry is a seminal and important film. One of the best films of the ‘70s, Dirty Harry is essentially an exploitation movie financed by a big time studio with its biggest star in the lead role. It looks...

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Basic Instinct

In Roger Ebert’s 1992 review, he wrote, "The film is like a crossword puzzle. It keeps your interest until you solve it, by the ending. Then it's just a worthless scrap with the spaces filled in." Narratively speaking, the same could be said for a number of Hitchcock films; It’s the style that keeps us coming back to those, and it’s the style, as well as the subtext, that keeps me coming back to Verhoeven’s film. I think it’s incredibly shortsighted of Ebert to see the film in this light considering...

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Through a Glass Darkly

Through a Glass Darkly is interesting if for no other reason than Bergman didn’t seem to really care for it all. One could chalk it up to the usual case of the artist’s self-deprecation, but when reading his book Images: My Life in Film you understand that Bergman had a different film in mind before he shot Through a Glass Darkly, and the result — which is certainly one of the most seminal foreign films of the ‘60s — was not to his liking. I think Bergman is too hard on himself and critiquing...

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Lethal Weapon turns 25

My thoughts on the 25th Anniversary of Lethal Weapon, and how the film affected my life as a cinephile, is now up at Edward Copeland's site. Here's a sample: Donner also makes the film re-watchable all these years later because the logistics of the action scenes make sense. Something modern action films are completely devoid of, letting your audience get their bearings and understand the confines of the space the film’s characters inhabit (especially during fight scenes) is what separates...

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Catching up with 2011: Midnight in Paris

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Catching up with 2011: Take Shelter

With Take Shelter, Jeff Nichols avoids the sophomore slump – his 2008 film Shotgun Stories was my pick for the best film of that year – by creating a moody, atmospheric nightmare; a film that is one half The Shining, with its haunting dream imagery that stems from the point of view of a man losing his mind, also one half Through a Glass Darkly with its poignant observations about how mental illness affects the family unit. Take Shelter is scary because of its imagery, yes, but moreso because...

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