MY MOVIE SHELF: Rudy

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 210  Days to go: 147

Movie #228:  Rudy

As I’ve said many times, the point of a biopic (or any movie based on a true story / inspired by real events) is not accuracy. It’s to tell a compelling story. Over the years, I’ve heard various claims against Rudy (and all kinds of these types of dramatized historical events, to be honest) that this or that or the other thing wasn’t really one hundred percent true, if it happened at all. I’m not surprised. Rudy, perhaps more than most, stretches the limits of believable human behavior (he gets a slow clap and a chant and a symbolic gesture of solidarity and a wisdom-spouting black mentor?) in the pursuit of hitting all the emotional sweet spots the story is striving for. But, not for nothing, it’s also gotten me to tear up on more than one occasion, so those emotional sweet spots know what they’re doing.

I’m not saying Rudy is a great movie, because it’s clearly not and it knows it’s not. But it can be an effective movie. In the realm of perseverance toward an impossible dream, in living for yourself and no one else, or even just in the realm of passionately loving a sports team, Rudy is an extremely effective movie. Rudy Ruettiger (Sean Astin) was just one of, like, a dozen kids from a blue-collar Catholic family whose patriarch (Ned Beatty) loved Notre Dame football. He was the runt of the litter by a mile, and yet he got it in his head that one day he would play for Notre Dame. It’s like the very definition of an impossible dream, though I do think everyone in the film is meaner to Rudy about it than they really have to be. Still, Rudy seems to know, deep down, what a pipe dream it is, until his friend dies in a steel mill accident and Rudy has that all-important epiphany about how short life really is.

He hops a bus to South Bend, enrolls in Holy Cross with the help of Father Cavanaugh (Robert Prosky), meets up with D-Bob (Jon Favreau) who becomes his tutor — and eventual friend — in exchange for Rudy being his wingman, and gets a job on the Notre Dame greens team with the aforementioned wise old(er) black man, literally named Fortune (Charles S. Dutton). These mentors and friends coach and guide and cajole and tough-love Rudy into buckling down and getting accepted at Notre Dame, where he turns his obsessive passion for the football team into a religious experience and spends a couple years on the prep team getting beat up as a matter of principle. He fights and works and tackles and preaches his belief of his value to the National Championship pursuits of his boys in blue and gold, but aside from having a lot of heart and guts and will, he’s still not any good. And that’s when apparently everyone at the university rallies behind him and convinces coach Dan Devine (Chelcie Ross) to let him dress and, ultimately, let him play a down. And technically, that last part, at least, really happened.

I’m not a Notre Dame fan, but I do love college football the most. I’ve had huge debates with my husband about whether college ball is better than the NFL. (It is.) I love the passion of not only the fans, but of the players, because it takes a lot of heart to play at that level — a deep desire and abiding love of the game. There is tradition and pageantry and community in those stadiums that can’t be matched anywhere else. I can relate to Rudy on that level, because we both love our teams. Really, truly love them. And whether it’s an entirely true tale or not, I can look up to Rudy, too, and know that maybe it’s not too late to make my dreams come true as well.

MY MOVIE SHELF: Iron Man

 

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 226  Days to go: 227

Movie #151:  Iron Man

I have at least one friend who’s going to be upset I don’t own any of the Iron Man movies, but those are the breaks. I actually like Iron Man 3 quite a bit, I just don’t have it. But Iron Man 2 is a messy, convoluted piece of garbage. At least from what I can remember of it.

I went into Iron Man completely cold. I’d never heard of Tony Stark or Pepper Potts or any of the mythology or lore surrounding Iron Man at all. So the movie had to do the heavy lifting of introducing me to this character I’d never encountered before without making it tedious and without feeling dumbed-down to the millions of Marvel comics fans who were coming to the film with dozens of pre-conceived notions and expectations about who and what Iron Man should be. In my completely unscientifically based opinion, I think it did an excellent job.

Everything you need to know about Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) is shown, not exposited (well, just a little exposited), in the first fifteen or twenty minutes of the movie. He’s cocky, he’s slick, he’s a genius and an incorrigible lothario. He’s also a mega-multi-zillionaire who sells weapons for a living.

So the movie sets up the capture of Tony Stark via attack by unspecified Middle Easterners using his own weapons against Americans, provides a little bit of backstory, then goes right into Tony’s captivity and how he secretly builds himself an armored super-suit to bust out of there. When he gets home, he modifies and perfects the super-suit, becomes Iron Man, and maybe gets drawn into additional unspecified Middle Eastern conflicts because of his emotional baggage on the subject. There’s also some sexual tension with his uber-assistant Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) — who doesn’t get a whole lot to do, but which I excuse because she’s basically the most competent, level-headed, boss chick ever and it never once feels like she’s just an errand-girl for Tony, but more like his keeper, his handler, his employer and she holds a lot of sway over him — and a nasty bit of betrayal from inside Tony’s inner circle.

I have to admit, I never really thought of Jon Favreau of any kind of Hollywood player before Iron Man, despite his breakout turn as the writer of Swingers. I certainly didn’t think of him as a director, and given the only big thing he’d done before this was Elf — which I almost categorically hate, truth be told — it’s understandable how blown away I was by his success with Iron Man. The story is tight and focused, the effects are amazing, and scenes are not wasted but rather used to their full potential (or thereabouts). Plus I think it’s pretty fun that he also plays the role of Happy Hogan. (You know, Raj on The Big Bang Theory really has a point about Stan Lee’s obsession with alliterative names.)

Since Iron Man is basically an origin story film, it works well that there’s not some external Big Bad nemesis to defeat, rather an intimate friend-turned-traitor who provides the impetus for said origin. It’s more contained that way, and allows the audience — particularly ones not familiar with the characters — to get acquainted, while still being entertaining. One of the reasons I think the current Marvel/Avengers franchise is so successful, in fact, is because Iron Man set it off to a great start. It’s definitely one of my favorite of the current films and one of my favorite of the current characters as well (but not the top spot, which goes to a single character in a single movie, yet to come). It’s a solid film that provides an excellent foundation for all the great, fun, imaginative Avengers movies yet to come.

And you’ve got to love a superhero who doesn’t mope around in his secret identity for once, right? Right.

MY MOVIE SHELF: Deep Impact

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 296  Days to go: 283

Movie #81: Deep Impact

Back at the start of 1998 there was a lot of hubbub within insider entertainment news about two different “giant asteroid” movies being made (and set to release ) at the same time. Within two months of each other that summer, Deep Impact and Armageddon were released. Armageddon was by far the bigger movie — bigger stars, bigger budget, bigger hit, plus a theme song that railroaded just about everything in its path — but for me, Deep Impact has always been the better one.

Armageddon was always meant to be a flashy, wise-cracking dude movie with explosions, and that’s fine. Those are good, enjoyable popcorn flicks, and they don’t need a lot of substance to succeed. It’s a save-the-world movie, concerned only with those doing the saving. Deep Impact, on the other hand, is a movie about human frailty and heroism — it’s about the people on the ground faced with the hopes and fears of a global mission to divert an extinction-level event-sized asteroid, and the harsh realities that force them to face their own mortality and decide what’s important.

On the surface, one could probably pin Deep Impact‘s humanity on its director Mimi Leder (as opposed to Armageddon‘s testosterone-obsessed Michael Bay), a woman who throughout her career directing (largely) TV episodes has always shown interest in the personal stories associated with great drama. Even her other action thriller motion picture, The Peacemaker, had a villain with an emotional, personal purpose. What makes Deep Impact so exceptional, though, are the multiple stories it encompasses and the breadth of their emotions contained within.

Elijah Wood plays a young high school student named Leo Biederman who is thrust into the spotlight when the anomaly he spots during astronomy club turns out to be an asteroid larger than Mount Everest on a collision course with Earth. But he’s still just a kid, in love with his high school sweetheart Sarah (Leelee Sobieski), interested in sex and motorbikes, and close to his parents. In a quintessentially teenager way, he finds the notoriety kind of thrilling at first, and as the time to collision draws nearer, he fights to hold things together, and matures quite a bit, as he would have to.

Tea Leoni, meanwhile, is Jenny Lerner, an ambitious researcher at MSNBC who stumbles on the story of the asteroid when looking into the questionable resignation of a top government official. She bluffs her way through a confidential meeting with the President (Morgan Freeman) enough to find out the true story and get first question (a significant boost to her career) at the White House press briefing on the matter. Suddenly, she too is thrust into the spotlight, seen by the nation as the face of any news concerning the asteroid. It’s everything she’s wanted professionally, but personally she is suffering. Her father (Maximilian Schell) has left her mother (Vanessa Redgrave) and married a much younger woman — only two years older than Jenny herself. Any other time this state of affairs would be a tough hurdle, but faced with the possible end of all life on Earth, Jenny is at loose ends, unable to find any solid footing — particularly after the suicide of her mother. She shuns her father in anger, but gives up her ride to safety at the zero hour to a colleague she’s always admired (Laura Innes) who has a young daughter, and seeks out her father to reconcile with him. That’s where she needs to be, because her family is what’s most important to her.

The astronauts sent into space to destroy the asteroid are also featured, but as fully realized people with strengths and weaknesses instead of as wacky balls of machismo. These astronauts feature a woman, for one, played by Mary McCormack, who joins Blair Underwood, Ron Eldard, Jon Favreau, Aleksandr Baluev and Robert Duvall on a mission of arrogance, humility, loss, solidarity and ultimately sacrifice. Their mission, above all, is to save mankind if they can, regardless of the cost, and they fulfill it with heartbreaking and heroic resolve.

The movie also has small moments of lovely character work: Leo’s dad (Richard Schiff) giving him items to trade (and hence his blessing) when Leo decides to go back for Sarah. The President facing the nation with calm leadership, pragmatism, hope and eventually heartfelt compassion. The meticulous beauty regimen of Jenny’s mom and the devastating realization that she’s preparing to take her own life. The wrenching goodbyes between Sarah and her parents as they hand over her baby brother to care for and send her off with Leo to survive without them, then their touching embrace as they await their ends.

Deep Impact is great. It’s a movie filled with touching and thoughtful moments, of the wide array of feelings and fears that would be an absolute certainty in the face of such an impending event. It’s a movie that is concerned with the human condition, without sacrificing action and suspense. It explores the realistic, years-long process between discovery and destruction of such an asteroid, and how life continues to go on all that time, despite the looming possibility of the end of the world. It’s an emotional, touching, heartbreaking film. So I guess it’s no surprise that Deep Impact, unlike Armageddon, always leaves me in tears.