Silverado (1985)

This is diverting and fun – almost all of the actors are comedians – and I enjoyed myself. Scott Glenn is so great. He is truly an underrated performer. And I love see Kevin Costner in movies in the early 1980s. He's so cute and fun; in Silverado he's downright playful. He's absolutely delightful to watch.

Kevin Kline is, quite oddly enough, not playing for laughs, even though this is obviously a comedy, and I'm not sure what that's about. But his seriousness doesn't get in the way of the pleasures of Silverado, which are really all about friendship and shooting the bad guys off of horses when they aren't expecting it.

Wyatt Earp (1994)

I gotta be honest. I had a lot of trouble telling all of these mustachioed men in Wyatt Earp apart. They truly all looked the same to me. And so I know that there was some clan that Wyatt Earp needed to kill, but I couldn't have picked a single one of those men out of a lineup. 

As for this 190-minute epic film, I really don't understand why USAmericans were so into three-hour movies with Kevin Costner or Mel Gibson or Tom Hanks in the 1990s. This fucking drags. 

And there is another problem too. Costner is a stoic dickhead throughout for whom it is almost impossible to feel any kind of sympathy. The film tries to dig into some ethical problems or something, but it fails at this. Instead we get a bloody revenge film pretending to be something resembling law and order. No law and order about it. This is just a vigilante film about a dude I didn't like very much. 

I will say I quite liked Dennis Quaid in this. But I don't have much else to say that is good. Oh, actually no I do. The photography is pretty great at times.

This was the final film I needed to see from the 1995 Oscars. I watched this, if you can believe it, on DVD. It was split into two discs, even. Extra old school.

Two with Kevin Costner

I don't know if you all have seen Draft Day, but I was into it. It is a kind of poor man's Moneyball. Ok, it has nothing to do with Moneyball, really, but it is about the general manager of a professional sports team fighting with the coach, fighting with his advisors, that kind of thing. So it has a Moneyball vibe. Kevin Costner is no Brad Pitt, and Ivan Reitman is no Bennett Miller, but hey, I loved Moneyball and I was into this, too.

For me this was all about the suspense of the thing. What is he going to do? How is this going to work? How does he get out of this mess they're in? And Kevin Costner is just a lot of fun, so watching him finagle his way through things is a delight. The filmmakers very intelligently keep a clock running at all times. One always feels a sense of urgency. By this I don't mean dread – the stakes just aren't that high in a game like this – but the stakes of a game itself, the rush of winning, of getting one over on the opponent, of coming out victorious. Draft Day has this in spades, and it is a fun ride, though not much else.

I will say, though, that I hadn't seen Chadwick Boseman in a film before (I skipped 42 and Get On Up), and so seeing him in this was incredible. He is so unbelievably good. I am in love. He is totally brilliant in this little film.

***

Now for Waterworld. I remember this getting a lot of flak when it came out in the mid-1990s, and I can't really remember why. Bloated budget, probably. All of that water! Here's the thing, though: the film looks cheap! This is a prime irony in film history, surely. One of the most expensive flops to date looks like it was done by cutting corners.

The film itself isn't too bad, though. The dystopia Waterworld describes is at least totally different and interesting when compared to the grey, zombie-infested dystopias of our own decade, or even the back-to-the-forest dystopias of Planet of the Apes or After Earth (not that I saw that, haha). I mean, Waterworld is just water. And that looks really cool. Plus, Costner's little boat is really cool, too. It has all kinds of little hidden compartments and he moves around on it like a little evolved monkey. It's quite fun.

The disaster part of the film has to do with the film's villain, Dennis Hopper, and his henchmen, all of whom are played in full cartoon mode. These portrayals are so silly, so completely ungrounded, that the film has no stakes at all. Jeanne Tripplehorn, Costner, Chaim Girafi, R.D. Call, and Michael Jeter are actually playing the scenes like real humans, but Hopper and his crew don't seem to understand, they clown it up in literally every sequence, and the director Kevin Reynolds stages the violence they commit and that is committed upon them as cartoonish, as well. It is easily this that kills the film. The plot is not that great, but lots of plots aren't that great. When you can't believe that there are any stakes in a film, that is a problem of an entirely different order. Waterworld could've been pretty cool, I think, and it's still not as bad as everyone made it out to be in 1995, but it is indeed a big mess.

Superman II

Man of Steel's trailer was awesome. I loved it. But the movie itself is actually absurd.

(My friend Walter reminded me that the trailer for Pearl Harbor was good, too.)

And it isn't just that Superman is rather a boring character (he is) or that the plot doesn't actually get started until at least halfway into the movie. I think it may be that Zack Snyder doesn't really know what he's doing. (Obviously a Michael Bay fan, Snyder one-ups Bay's falling skyscrapers in Transformers 3 by including at least three falling skyscrapers in Man of Steel.) Snyder alternates between explosion-filled setpieces and sententious scenes about "doing the right thing", and this is, basically, all he's got for us. In fact, somehow the movie manages to be about 90% exposition.

The sententiousness is provided by Russell Crowe and Kevin Costner – and more often than not only the sonorous tones of their voices (both fine in the movie, even though their characters are absurdly crafted). The content of this sententiousness is Snyder's usual generic mix of USAmerican patriotism, love of violence, Christian imagery, and pro-militarism. Yay America! Fun game: try to count the number of American flags in Man of Steel. Yay Jesus! Kal-El tells the militarized U.S. government that he is thirty-three years old. Since Henry Cavill was only twenty-nine during filming, it seems a rather blatant reference to the age of Jesus Christ when he was crucified. Yay military power! There are no democratically elected leaders in the movie; only fascist dictators and military leaders. But adolescent Clark, while getting picked on but refusing to punch the bully in the face, is reading (for pleasure, apparently) Plato's Republic. Some people, Man of Steel says, ought to have more power than most. It's okay if someone has a great amount of power as long as it's the right man who has the power. It's okay to break laws made by the majority, as long as you know you are doing the right thing. This is, of course – like Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises (Nolan was a co-writer on Man of Steel) – an apologia for dictatorship, increased government authority, and (not to be alarmist but) the police state.

It sounds like what I really object to in Man of Steel is its politics, but it's the movie that is bad: the politics are only incidental. Still, there are lots of cool things in the movie. Because it is setpiece after setpiece, I really didn't get bored until the last half hour of the movie (and I prefer a movie with this much action to a snorer like The Avengers, where I just kept waiting for a setpiece.) The art direction is Alien-inspired and looks really, really cool. If Amy Adams is miscast as Lois Lane (someone with less "pluck" and more gravitas would have been my choice), it was nice to see Clark and Lois as grown-ups as opposed to the teenagers who played the pair in Bryan Singer's Superman reboot from 2006. And Henry Cavill is just... so... pretty. Even more than he was when he was in his early twenties. I mean, his face is perfect. He's not so much sexy as he is adonic.

Still, the movie is almost not worth watching. And that's Zack Snyder's fault. Because while Snyder knows how to blow things up and create a visually enticing setpiece, he simply has no idea how to have any fun.