Ludicrous movie – part satire, part macabre black comedy.
They are a weirdo household, oddball vestiges from another century but somehow less nuts than the WASP irritants they must interact with. It’s a lot of fun and and I didn’t snore once.
And spot Peter MacNicol, a.k.a. Dr. Janosz Poha. And Harmony from Buffy. And Chandler Bing’s unfunny boss. And a dozen more familiar faces.
Christopher Lloyd’s Uncle Fester with carrot sticks up his nostrils should not be funny. But it is.
Another memorable number from the 1993 movie vault, which I often posit the ‘best year ever for movies’: Mrs. Doubtfire, Schindler’s List, The Fugitive, Jurassic Park, Tombstone, Falling Down. Am I wrong? Have I missed anything?
It’s in all honesty not much of an action movie, the scenes terribly staged and edited, another case of the viewer not having a clue what is going on. It’s as unimaginative as it gets, ADHD Eisenstein. However, as satire and social commentary it is terrifyingly on the ball about today’s nightmarish cultural landscape. It actually predicted 2020.
It nails the all-out assault on language, the SJW proscription against alternate viewpoints, the restriction of real individualism in the quest for Utopia. Who knew that offending someone could be a crime? Well, it sadly is these days. Because they (the crusading creatures) have been allowed to get away with this.
The only thing this movie gets wrong is the method of wiping one’s arse. Britons will be doing it ‘Old Skool’ until the next extinction-level event.
“I didn’t kill my wife.”
“I don’t care.”
The Fugitive (1993) still holds up today, a thousand action-thrillers on. It’s now widely considered the benchmark for the ‘smart’ popcorn movie (big name star, TV source material, Oscar pretensions). There are spectacular set pieces here but it’s the intelligence of the script and the care in which the characters are sculpted which first captivated audiences. The battle of wits between the two leads and the obsession with which they pursue their agendas is like Maverick vs. Iceman but without the fighter jets and a volleyball scene. Well, perhaps a more mature version.
I saw it the other day for the first time in a decade and I was struck by how mature the film is, how it doesn’t pay lip service to target audiences/demographics. It’s simply a wrongly accused bloke on the run, but these are humans and not cardboard stock characters.
Stylistically, there is one sequence which dominates. A film lecturer I had at university showed us it in class as a textbook/expert use of montage, how a sequence so brief can cover so much crucial plot information. It takes your average modern-day movie an hour to cover what’s done here in under five minutes:
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 