CS Film Club II

Yeah, I really liked the initial conversation they had at the restaurant.

Let's see.  I haven't seen Little Dorrit, but that nomination for Alec Guinness screams "career honors."  Dean Stockwell is good in Married to the Mob but Kline is zanier and more memorably energetic.  Haven't seen Tucker: The Man and His Dream, but Martin Landau's win for Ed Wood was in the future so that loss worked out in the end.  And River Phoenix's nomination for Running on Empty in this category was an outlandish act of category fraud which should not have been rewarded.  So yeah, Kline was the right choice.

He's very obviously the lead in that movie but he was young, so the campaigned him as supporting in favor of campaigning Judd Hirsch as the lead.

Landau's good in Tucker but I'm not sure his performance screams Oscar-worthy.

The real question is should Alan Rickman have been nominated for Die Hard?

How about Michael Keaton for Beetlejuice?

Preamble for my pick this round


Rewatching Back to the Future Part II

Given my opinion of the original Back to the Future shifted so strongly on my recent rewatch, I figured I should give its first sequel a second look before I finally see Part III. At one point I seem to recall claiming that Back to the Future Part II was superior to its predecessor, which is not an opinion I stand by. I get why I felt that way. The first film was so familiar to me thanks to its reputation and pop-culture osmosis that Part II felt a little fresher, but in hindsight, it's clearly a lesser movie. For one, there's that whole running bit of Marty being easily baited into acting like an idiot when someone calls him chicken, an unwelcome addition to the character that just makes him seem dumb. I also don't think the film's screenplay holds together nearly as well as Part I. The set-ups, while still present, feel more obvious and telegraphed and the material also isn't as cohesive. This is very much a movie of three distinct parts: 2015, alternate reality 1985, and a return to 1955 which unfolds in the background of the first movie's story. All of these parts have their merit but it feels closer to a series of episodes from a hypothetical Back to the Future TV show than a cohesive movie.

That having been said, there's a lot of fun to be had in these episodes. The last act of the film in particular is a real treat, with Zemeckis really pushing special effects technology to allow the film to interact with the last movie's events. It's mindboggling when you start to think about how they pulled off these shots (especially given the camera movement and angles) but it's all still in service of the story. I also quite like the middle-section with Marty slowly discovering the dystopic world he's entered into. It's funny and really sets the stakes of the story. That said, I do think the film's opening is a little weak. There's definitely some good jokes here (Jaws 19) but it's also the most derivative section of the movie.

So, yeah, Back to the Future Part II does not live up to the greatness of the first film, but it is a very entertaining movie with some fun set-pieces and creative filmmaking. I suspect Zemeckis took on this sequel more as a an excuse to indulge his interests in special effects than to tell a story and in that regard he probably made the most of the opportunity.

B+

Gonna be twice as funny when I watch Your Name now.

Back to the Future Part III

In hindsight, it's odd that I've taken so long to finally see Back to the Future Part III, not just because it's the caper to one of the most successful film trilogies of all-time, but also because Part II ends on such a dramatic cliffhanger. Then again, Part II also features a teaser of the Western adventure to come so I very easily could have rationalized putting it off with, "Eh, it looks like things will shake out okay". It is interesting that the movie is such a full-blown Western given that genre has never been more dead than it was in the 1980s. There were some hits like Pale Rider and Young Guns, but the failure of Heaven's Gate seemed to really put the fear of God into studios and the genre really fell out of favour in American cinema. There's something cool then about Zemeckis and company pushing ahead with the idea just because they wanted to. The movie picks up immediately where Part II left off, with Doc Brown having been accidently sent back to 1885 and Marty hooking up with the Doc Brown of 1955 to get back to the future. Other Doc (Doc Prime?) is content to be left in the old west, but Marty decides to journey back to 1885 when he learns Doc is to be assassinated by Buford Tannen, who is of course the ancestor of Biff. I have to assume if they ever make a Back to the Future Part IV, it will be about destroying the Biff family line as his blood is too inherently evil.

Anyway, the movie is less concerned with telling a story of time travel paradoxes and messing with history then it is giving our characters one final lighthearted adventure. I'm of two minds on this. On the one hand, in an era where every franchise feels like it needs to be this epic cinematic event, there's a lot of charm in a movie that's content to be smaller than its predecessors. On the other hand, this adventure is so light-hearted and breezy that the film is somewhat lacking in suspense or excitement. It's a little too nice. I also don't think the film works entirely as a conclusion. Part II placed so much emphasis on how Marty becomes a pitiful loser in adulthood, but that future becomes lost in the rest of the adventure and hijinks. When it finally comes back up in Part III, the only payoff is that Marty learns to have a cooler head and not be so easily baited, which will hopefully avoid the future we had glimpsed at the beginning of Part II. The story is wrapped up but in such a minor way. On that note, the fact that the "nobody calls me chicken" bit from the last movie becomes something Marty needs to outgrow as part of his arc does make it a little more tolerable, but it's also a perfect embodiment of why these sequels, for all their entertainment value, are inferior to the original. The first Back to the Future is about coming to see your parents as human; to recognize their flaws and insecurities mirror your own and treat them with a little more empathy. Back to the Future II and III are about Marty learning not to overreact so much when people call him childish names.

So overall, what did I think of Back to the Future Part III? Well, I liked it. It isn't as perfectly constructed as Part I or as visually ambitious as Part II, but it's still an entertaining romp with some likable characters, good jokes, and fun scenes. It's cute to see Doc get a romance (even if it's a rather underwritten one) and in general I liked seeing these characters forced into a new setting, both technologically and socially. That climactic train heist is also a pretty strong finale and both Zemeckis and screenwriter Bob Gale remain adapt at pacing a story. The film on the whole never really wowed me and it's not a film I could mount a particularly passionate defense of if I were pressed, but I had a good time with it.

B


In for next round.

We've got a few days and only a couple reviews left, no rush. In the meantime, who's in for next round? I'll start cramming names together.

I'm in, baby.