Contact (1997)

USA, 150 minutes

Director: Robert Zemeckis

Writers: James V. Hart, Michael Goldenberg, Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan

Photography: Don Burgess

Music: Alan Silvestri

Editor: Arthur Schmidt

Cast: Jodie Foster, Matthew McConaughey, James Woods, John Hurt, Tom Skerritt, Angela Bassett, Rob Lowe, David Morse, William Fichtner, Jake Busey, Larry King

I had to start by asking myself what kind of a nut am I for movies about UFOs and first contact with aliens from outer space? Some kind of a nut anyway, as I tallied the titles from a generic “best first contact movies” search of the internet: The Day the Earth Stood Still, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and especially Close Encounters of the Third Kind are favorites I have looked at over and over, as it happens, with others I have at least appreciated (Arrival, Interstellar, E.T., even The Abyss). Contact is high on a lot of those lists too, although I hadn’t seen it since it was new. I liked it then but, more than 25 years later, I felt some trepidation about approaching it again.

Part of the reason I’ve been working at a roundup of movies by director Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Forrest Gump, and I probably should have got to Romancing the Stone) was exactly about that trepidation, hoping to get some perspective on the intriguing Zemeckis before I returned to Contact. On that point, I think now that Zemeckis’s strongest period was in the late ‘80s, with Roger Rabbit and the respectably resolved (and family-friendly!) complexities of his Back to the Future trilogy. Forrest Gump was a kind of crucible from which Zemeckis may never have fully recovered, leaning into flashy distracting special effects by rote, for their own sake, and putting narrative coherence into the backseat. There’s a lot of that in Contact. Start with the ridiculously repurposed footage of Bill Clinton, which has not aged well.

Pinocchio ’22 (2022)

The first film adaptation of the 19th-century Italian stories by Carlo Collodi is the 1940 Disney Pinocchio, but no decade since has gone by without at least one movie or TV version. Last year, in fact, there were two. With a third from 2021, a Russian picture called Pinocchio: A True Story, that means the 2020s are already holding up their end of this bargain. Pinocchio is a live-action / CGI Disney that was directed and cowritten by Robert Zemeckis, starring Tom Hanks. Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is what it sounds like. I haven’t, full disclosure, seen any of the other versions but I got a look at those two anyway along with the 1940. Start with the Zemeckis. On IMDb, some 38,000 voters have ranked this remake an aggregate 5.0. That’s not good—compare GdT’sP’s 92,000 going 7.6. It’s not hard to see why. One of these movies is clearly better than the other. Tom Hanks makes a creditable enough Geppetto but he can’t carry the whole thing. It is faithful to the 1940 version to a fault, practically scene for scene. It feels notably uninspired and insipid. It has little to add to or improve on the Disney original and the changes it makes can be almost comical. Pleasure Island, the destination for wayward boys, if you recall, was populated by boys playing pool, wantonly vandalizing property, and, above all, smoking stogies—all of them, including Pinocchio, whose face turned funny colors as a result.

But in 2022, images of smoking are frowned on and now part of routine content warnings, even if smokers are shown paying the price. Disney decided to take the easy way out with movie-rating panels and just cut the smoking out completely. All things considered, it’s probably the better idea for society at large, and it shows some of the ways things have changed since 1940. Here’s another one. An interesting plot point, which is that Geppetto had a wife and son who are now dead, was not in the 1940 version. It completely makes sense as motivation for Geppetto, of course, but when I first saw it cropping up in the 2022 version I took it as unnecessary embellishment. As a plot point, however, it is really front and center in del Toro’s workup of the story, which arguably turns on it, and makes me think it must come from the original stories by Collodi (which I haven’t read). In turn, it makes me wonder why it was taken out of the 1940 version. Including the point is ultimately one of the few improvements, all relatively minor, that the 2022 Zemeckis makes on the 1940. For his part, del Toro seems to be trying to restore some of the qualities of Collodi’s original stories. His Pinocchio is refreshingly sassy and headstrong, much like reports of the Collodi stories. Del Toro, not surprisingly, certainly has the best Blue Fairy of all of them—even the Zemickis version is an improvement on the saccharine 1940 lady.

Unencumbered by Disney’s family-oriented priorities, del Toro lets the story range into much darker, more emotionally resonant and believable precincts. I’m not sure setting it in Fascist Italy was exactly the right way to go for this story, but at least it afforded a priceless cameo from Il Duce himself. And Del Toro is generally more focused on delving into Geppetto’s motivations to make a puppet and want it to be a real boy—it’s Geppetto who wants it, a simple and ingenious shift of emphasis that makes the story richer and more complex. Del Toro manages to take the story all the way into Cain and Abel stuff. Del Toro’s animation rivals the Disney original and is arguably even better, but there I think my judgment might be affected by how much better del Toro’s narrative is. The animation is very different but equally good in both. I’m not sure looking at these three Pinocchios in such close proximity is the way to do it. I’m sick of Monstro the whale and the nose-growing bits by now (del Toro goes to town on the nose thing much more than either of the others). I would recommend separating them out further than consecutive days. But the 1940 Disney and the 2022 del Toro are equally essential and I wouldn’t know which one to recommend first—probably the del Toro, if you’re an adult. The 2022 Zemeckis—sadly, because I have residual interest in his work—is eminently skippable.

Forrest Gump (1994)

USA, 142 minutes

Director: Robert Zemeckis

Writers: Winston Groom, Eric Roth

Photography: Don Burgess

Music: Alan Silvestri

Editor: Arthur Schmidt

Cast: Tom Hanks, Robin Wright, Gary Sinise, Sally Field, Mykelti Williamson, Michael Conner Humphreys, Hanna Hall, Haley Joel Osment, numerous archival holograms

As of this writing, Forrest Gump ranks #11 on the IMDb Top 250 Movies list. As voted on by millions of IMDb users, it’s one of the most distinctly unusual lists for movie fans, a popularity contest like few others. Citizen Kane is humbled down at #94 and, in the #1 position (which it has held for a long time), stands The Shawshank Redemption. At this point, Forrest Gump is also one of the most successful money-makers in movie history, ranking #72 for lifetime grosses (according to Box Office Mojo). I would have been disappointed to learn all this about Forrest Gump in 1994 when I walked out of the theater after seeing it, but even the critics seem to be on board with the general assessment. The picture recently moved into the top 500 greatest movies of all time in the aggregated big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? Full disclosure, Forrest Gump is a movie I despise. I threw a 4 out of 10 at it in the IMDb poll years ago and didn’t see it a second time for 28 years. (Note: As a corrective to this intemperate display, see list below.)

Compare Shawshank, which I gave a 6 for being more generally good-hearted. You may say Forrest Gump is good-hearted—certainly Tom Hanks playing the title character is known for a good-hearted persona—but honestly the point of this movie escaped me, beyond the special effects, especially when you get into the details of the screenplay. Valorizing a “simple” Southern man whose IQ is 75 is commendable in a way, but what are we supposed to get out of it? He sits on a bench in Savannah, Georgia, with his box of chocolates, telling his precious, long-winded backstory to people waiting for buses. He’s boring. They ignore him as deranged but probably (hopefully) harmless. His stories are mostly matters of luck—good and bad, it’s all the same to Gump, he just carries on. Other continuing themes involve running—literally running—and a feckless love interest kinda sorta girlfriend, Jenny (Robin Wright), who is presented as a victim of hackneyed liberal ‘60s values. I didn’t know why this movie exists at all, let alone has achieved such lasting massive popularity.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)

USA / UK, 104 minutes

Director: Robert Zemeckis

Writers: Gary K. Wolf, Jeffrey Price, Peter S. Seaman, Ted Osborne, Ali Taliaferro

Photography: Dean Cundey

Music: Alan Silvestri

Editor: Arthur Schmidt

Cast: Bob Hoskins, Charles Fleischer, Kathleen Turner, Stubby Kaye, Christopher Lloyd, Joanna Cassidy, Amy Irving, Lou Hirsch, Mel Blanc, June Foray

Who Framed Roger Rabbit deserves a fair amount of credit along with Studio Ghibli for launching this golden age of animated feature movies in which we now live. No point going into the doldrums that animation suffered from the 1960s on, when cost-cutting and merchandising to the death was the name of the game. Whatever anyone thinks of its entertainment value now—my take is that it holds up remarkably well—Roger Rabbit came along and shook things up, making the case an animated or mixed live action picture could do bank and win Oscars. In the name of nostalgia as much as anything it loaded up with vintage greats, from Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny to Donald and Daffy Duck, along with Betty Boop, Yosemite Sam, Droopy Dog, Woody Woodpecker, and many others. They're all part of the extravaganza—for once, money was no object in making an animated picture.

I am also struck by how it works an idea that Frank Miller and Alan Moore were playing with over in the comic book world at about the same time: what if, in the 1930s and 1940s, superheroes were real—what would they be like? Just so, Roger Rabbit imagines a world where a "toon" is a life form with specific properties living in the world with us. Because of what cartoons are and can do, the result is infinitely more surreal than anything anyone got to in the comic books with superheroes. Roger Rabbit can be surprisingly disturbing right down on the profound levels, like the best surrealism, particularly Toontown proper, a neighborhood in Los Angeles. It doesn't hurt, of course, that executive producer Steven Spielberg was on board this project with his production company, which in turn brought in one of Spielberg's most gifted proteges to direct, Robert Zemeckis, a special effects aficionado with a knack for making his movies work like finely tuned clocks (Romancing the Stone, Back to the Future).

Back to the Future (1985)

USA, 116 minutes
Director: Robert Zemeckis
Writers: Robert Zemeckis, Bob Gale
Photography: Dean Cundey
Music: Alan Silvestri
Editors: Harry Keramidas, Arthur Schmidt
Cast: Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd, Crispin Glover, Lea Thompson, Claudia Wells, Thomas F. Wilson, Huey Lewis, Frances Lee McCain, James Tolkan

Everything about Back to the Future is a little hectic. It was rushed to make an August release date in 1985 and when test screenings started to get standing O's it was rushed further to make an Independence Day release. It was getting standing O's in general release within some 10 weeks of the finish of shooting it. For a few months in 1985, its present-day events, dated quite precisely October 26 and November 5, were still in the future of viewers. Back to the Future turned out to be the #1 moneymaker of 1985 and now sits comfortably in IMDb's curious list of 250 Top Rated Movies, currently #43, just behind Terminator 2 and just ahead of Raiders of the Lost Ark. As movie entertainment goes, it's hard to deny Back to the Future. In retrospect it offers one of the purest examples of '80s teen comedy, complete with Michael J. Fox, designer jeans, feather haircuts, pulsing Huey Lewis soundtrack, and a bunch of good jokes.

But ultimately it defies categorizing—is it science fiction, romantic comedy, coming-of-age, period piece, action / thriller / suspense, or even ... musical? It sits in my head as science fiction, because it's a time travel story, but that's more in the vein of Groundhog Day or Peggy Sue Got Married, where the fantastic events are just the given premise and everything else is more or less about people. On the other hand Back to the Future is also one of those pictures so full of movie suspense rituals you really want to scream sometimes. Oh no! Another thing went wrong! At the worst possible moment! My annoyance probably speaks to the power of the movie to make us care about its characters and believe the situation—I really want to see Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) make it from 1955 back to 1985 in those climactic scenes. Credit much of this to the screenplay by Bob Gale and director Robert Zemeckis, which is funny and well put together. As can be seen here, Zemeckis is also one of the more gifted students of Steven Spielberg, an executive producer here. The script is tight and scrupulously fair about working through the characters and their motivations. They're integrated so neatly into the events that you don't notice or can forgive the ridiculously unexplainable. Speaking of hectic, the movie hits a pace of 88 miles per hour from the start and never lets it flag or really pads out much and the time goes by like it didn't happen, even when you have to snort at some of its conceits. And you do have to snort at some of its conceits.

Allied (2016)

Brad Pitt is back to killing stinking Nazis and there are many details about this movie I am honor-bound to conceal from you. It's a World War II movie about spies set in Casablanca, wishing very hard that it could be the movie Casablanca, which if you will recall had numerous false endings in the delicious pile-up at the end. So mum's the word bub. With director Robert Zemeckis running the show (Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Forrest Gump), there was bound to be at least a little blast of the meta in Allied. Brad Pitt is Max Vatan, of Medicine Hat, Alberta, a special operations man for the British. Marion Cotillard is Marianne Beausejeur of Paris, a French Resistance fighter. The first half, set in yes French Moroccan Casablanca, is about their mission to assassinate a German ambassador. They fall in love, the mission is a spectacular success (maybe 15 or more visible Nazi kills), and they decide to get hitched in London. Ain't love grand? They have a baby—outdoors, actually, during a German bombing raid. Yes, of course it's overdone, but wait till you see the spectacle of the bombing planes, probing searchlights, giving birth, antiaircraft fire, and even a dirty Nazi plane brought right down to the ground. Huzzah! Next thing you know, Marianne is officially under suspicion by the British military of being a filthy German spy. Well, there's the central conflict for you, and now I must refrain from saying any more. I can tell you it's a pretty good show, tightly written, propulsive, and nearly always interesting. There's some flab around the end of the second third that could get it under two hours if they cared, maybe 20 or so uninteresting minutes. Pitt is solid with his middle-aged Robert Redford shtick which suits him fine. I haven't actually seen that much of Cotillard before but she's fine here too as a sultry dark and mysterious beautiful European woman. My favorite parts were in the first half in Casablanca. It was not at all like the city in the 1942 picture but much more naturally exotic and atmospheric, with strange sights and sounds and ways. The black, red, and white Nazi insignia never fails to fill me with dread and loathing and there's plenty of that here too. In fact, this movie is for anyone who enjoys seeing Nazis killed dead, not to mention an almost swell love story. Not bad.

The Walk (2015)

I need to get out more, but there's a problem. Too often I seem to find myself the grumpy old man in the midst of happy annoying people, especially at the movies. People have always talked and been annoying in movie theaters. I'm not sure exactly why it bothers me more now—maybe the freedoms of watching them at home, including the solitude and peace and quiet, the self-selected interruptions and breaks—for discussion, even, when with people—have spoiled me. Or maybe it's worse out there now—it's true we never had the screens of mobile devices to contend with, but we had smokers for years. Lighters and matches are nearly as bad as those screens for glare, not to mention the carcinogenic risks of secondhand smoke, and the stink. So I decided to embark on a "going out" project in regard to movies. This will enable me, perhaps, to keep up better, and also provide an outlet for when a movie has been affected by a poor viewing experience. I'll talk about the poor viewing experience—that will show them!

Well, as they say, "Man plans, God laughs." The Walk turned out to be only the third movie in my life I've seen in a public screening all by myself (the others are Supergirl in 1984 and Broken Arrow in 1996). It's a bit like throwing a no-hitter, it seems to happen so infrequently as to be a special occasion unto itself, but in all cases I was hedging my bets one way or another. With The Walk I saw it at a Thursday matinee, the day before it was banished from town after an ignominious and dismal two weeks, with the stink of failure on it. Good thing I was alone too, because I sat there bawling for a lot of it. No, not at Joseph Gordon-Levitt's French accent. The movie has problems like crazy, enumerated in the bad reviews. But two active powerful elements were going on for me in The Walk. The first is perhaps personal, though I know it is shared on some connecting points with millions or even billions of others—the World Trade Center Twin Towers, for better or worse, are now the worst features in a haunted, blighted landscape of memory. The image of them implies only their absence, and then the circumstances, and then the fallout, which we are still experiencing, our stupid actions in the world and the fallout. Indeed, people are so troubled by the image of the Twin Towers (though mostly not for my reasons) that it has been systematically airbrushed out of many movies and TV shows in the years since September 11, 2001. As with the 2008 documentary Man on Wire, for which The Walk is a fine complement (and an entirely different movie), a good deal of power lies in casually using exactly that image, affirming the reality that those buildings existed. It's also good at capturing a time when playful acts of anarchy could be taken as noble and beautiful in their daring.

The other point is that The Walk is directed by special effects wizard Robert Zemeckis (Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Forrest Gump, and the Back to the Future trilogy), and thus, paradoxically, one of the things I liked best was that I could hardly stand to look at much of the second half, turning my head, holding up my hand, looking out of the sides of my eyes or through fingers. Philippe Petit, the wire walker, walked back and forth across a line between two points at the top of the world's tallest skyscrapers. We see it in all its vivid CGI reality. It convinced me—my stomach testified to the effectiveness as much as my turned head, and my balls did too. Winds are high up there, and it's way high up there. Petit crossed that line eight times. He laid down on it. It's just tremendous what he did. It's overwhelming. Not just the physical accomplishment (by the way, he had stepped on a nail just a few weeks earlier and the wound had not entirely healed), but doing it as a gesture of beauty and grace. It's the best thing that ever happened to those buildings, we know that at least. Start with Man on Wire. Finish with The Walk. See it on the biggest screen possible. Don't look down.