A BOX OF CHOCOLATES

A good-sized book could be written with a title such as Whatever Happened to Bob Zemeckis?

Who?

He is the guy who directed Forrest Gump, Back to the Future and Who Framed Roger Rabbit… all films which anyone could be proud of having made. Gump… all by itself… is enough of a career milestone to establish any director in the pantheon of great American filmmaking.

Bob Zemeckis might well have been crowned his generation’s Frank Capra. Trust me, higher praise than that is rarely dispensed.

Here is the rub: what those films have in common besides director Zemeckis is they were each made in the latter part of the 20^th century. What happened after that gets us back to the reason for the book, Whatever Happened to Bob Zemeckis?

For reasons about which I am not qualified to pontificate, in 2004 with his production of The Polar Express, director Zemeckis walked away from the things that were at the core of his great movies; increasingly focusing on the technological---rather than the human---aspects of storytelling and filmmaking.

There have been 10 Zemeckis films made in the 21^st century, culminating with the currently-in-release HERE. These motion pictures illustrate one of the major left turns ever taken by any artist anywhere at any time. Imagine Van Gogh deciding to give up painting to become a cabinet maker, or Frank Lloyd Wright turning his attention to designing highways instead of buildings.

It is not as if Mr. Zemeckis has had any real amount of success with this new passion of his. Every movie he has made in the last twenty years combined, from Polar Express to HERE… has not had the box office or critical acclaim of the singular Forrest Gump.

I am not going to go on. This deserves a major psychological treatise by someone much more qualified than I. Let me simply close out this unhappy chapter with this review: HERE is a terrible movie, a waste of time for its audience and the artists that participated in its construction. Frankly, it makes me angry that someone with the talent of Bob Zemeckis has somehow descended to this kind of drivel.

A note to anyone out there who decides to do the definitive analysis on the Zemeckis demise; contact me. I do have one small piece of insight that might provide a clue to any biographer.

On the other side of the current movie scene is A Complete Unknown. It is a good movie and well worth your time. Timothee Chalamet is an authentic movie star, and he is totally believable as the young Bob Dylan. Edward Norton is perfect as Pete Seeger. James Mangold directed and co-wrote the screenplay with Jay Cocks based on the book Dylan Goes Electric! by Elijah Wald.

I came late to Dylan’s music and lyrics, but even though a bit old for the folk music scene of the 60s, I remember being impressed by the wit and wisdom of some of the rhymes that were attributed to this young genius. The movie only disappoints in that not all of Dylan’s words and music are heard in the film. Too much to include? I would have settled for the addition of a few bars of Tangled up in Blue.

Hit Man and The Last Showgirl could be teamed as a classic double bill. Two totally different movies that somehow complement each other… yet are just about good enough to stand alone. Hit man is a modest comedy that turns into a sexy romance and thence into a thriller. Not Double Indemnity, but smart enough to be in that company. The Last Showgirl sometimes receives criticism for being “thin” in its storytelling. Let me go with its strengths. A wonderful/gutsy performance by Pamela Anderson and a terrific tour de force by Jamie Lee Curtis. Both, Hit Man and The Last Showgirl, are worthy of your time.

Saturday Night takes its viewers behind the scenes at Rockefeller Center during the 90 minutes before the very first presentation of what would become NBC’s iconic television series, Saturday Night Live. Would you believe the date is October 11, 1975? That’s right, folks. This year, 2025, will be the 50^th anniversary of the show everyone knows about… even without watching.

As you might expect, the movie is loaded with what are now nostalgic references to things, people, and places, and it does manage to capture, with some verisimilitude, the show must go on… but will it?... freneticism of something as groundbreaking as what a then 30-year-old Lorne Michaels was attempting to bring to a national audience on network TV.

Is it as good a film as Network, or as good as any episode of The Newsroom, or Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip? I don’t think so… but how many shows can meet that standard? Will you be entertained while viewing this inside baseball yarn? I would be surprised if you report in as a negative.

The cast is a large one and I will not go through them all but do feel I should single out Nicholas Braun, who does a flawless Andy Kaufman, Cooper Hoffman… who, if memory serves, is spot on to what I remember of junior network executive, Dick Ebersol, and… Wm. Dafoe, who although I didn’t know the menacing, meddling TV exec Dave Tebet he plays, gave me chills by reminding me what those types were (still are?) like.

One of my earliest recollections is sitting in my parent’s living room in front of the radio and listening to a wonderful presentation of The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas.

Almost as terrific as that nearly 80-year-old memory is the current rendition of the quintessential story of betrayal and revenge in this three-hour motion picture (yep… count ‘em… a very full 179 minutes). These guys… I do not name them here because I am sure my readers have never heard of them… really know how to make a movie.

This is the way Hollywood used to at least try to make films in the “good old days.” Unfortunately, not so much anymore.

The Count of Monte Cristo has everything you want in an old-fashioned adventure movie… beautiful people saying beautiful and profound things, gorgeous costumes, vile villains, a noble (albeit understandably flawed) hero, sets that are ultra lush, settings that are even better, dynamic music, thrilling action sequences, duels at dawn, fabulous moments of suspense, moral dilemmas. Trust me, it has been a long time since you have seen a movie this fulsome, let alone this well made.

One final moment of applause: Let’s hear it for Alexandre Dumas. I don’t know how many times his 19^th century tale has been depicted… Google says “countless,” but does go on to mention productions in 1934, 1954, 1975, and 2002 (without including dates on more than a dozen others… let alone the modern-day homage known as The Shawshank Redemption).

This is not necessarily Oscar material… but, I have to say, somewhere other than heaven, there should be some major awards for good stories… well told. Until then, warm up that choir of angels for this latest version of The Count of Monte Cristo.

 

Barney Rosenzweig