Star Wars 1977
In reference to Lucas’s prequels, my mother always says that the new ones will never stand up to the original trilogy. There is truth to this even ignoring the inferior quality of the modern films, as the first tales of the Skywalker clan had a freshness and an innocence that the Star Wars saga, beaten down by decades of technological advancements and Special Editions, can never recreate. Harrison Ford may be a household name today, but in 1977 he and the rest of Lucas’s crew (as well as Lucas himself, save a turn as director of American Graffiti) were unknowns, all the better to create memorable characters with. We watch Natalie Portman portray Luke and Leia’s mother, and to us she is Natalie Portman; when we witness Mark Hamill’s performance as Luke Skywalker, he is Luke Skywalker. Even Ford, who appears to us time and time again as Indiana Jones and Jack Ryan, is more recognizable under the name of Han Solo than the moniker that appears over a starfield at the film’s conclusion. The only word to sum up the original trilogy is "magic," as Lucas and crew captured all that is good about motion pictures — great performances, memorable dialogue, smart, interesting stories, and things we’ve never seen before shown to us in ways we’ve never seen things presented in — and bottled it into about six hours of celluloid (and as of Tuesday, DVD.) The film that started it all in 1977 is not the best of the trilogy, but is infinitely watchable as we see the beginnings of the saga, young and whiny Luke learning the ways of the Force from Ben Kenobi and starting a life-changing journey that concluded in Return of the Jedi. Star Wars is magical, a feat Lucas nor any other director may never again achieve again.
Raiders of the Lost Ark 1981
Steven Spielberg and George Lucas are a fascinating duo. On the DVD for Star Wars Ep I: The Phantom Menace, we see bonus footage of the production of the 1999 box office smash: Lucas gives his old friend Steve a tour of the set, describing what the large-scale droid battle on Naboo would look like. We, even having seen the film before, have a hard time imagining it based on what little information Lucas is imparting. What we can imagine is the gears turning inside Spielberg’s head; we know he imagines it completely, past any extent we could ever hope to achieve. These to men have creative heads on their shoulders that the rest of the world can only dream to possess, and in 1981 that imagination produced one of cinema’s most classic works of art, Raiders of the Lost Ark. Here we have an amazing character, this Indiana Jones, departing on adventures we could only dream about living — or before this, even witnessing on the big screen. To Asia! To the Middle East! To Europe! If there’s any question that we should be rooting for the man in the soft brown hat, here are Nazis to oppose him. Nazis! The filmmakers toy with our expectations; Jones is much different than the usual globetrotting hero, choosing his gun in a sword fight and cracking a joke as easily as his whip. Villains aren’t as clear-cut, either; we alternate between money and power as bad guy motivation while Asian torture experts whip out their…clothes hangars. What fun Raiders of the Lost Ark is, with mythical heros, the guy getting the girl, and an almost literal dues ex machina. What geniuses George Lucas and Steven Spielberg are.
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie 1969
I have seen no greater example of the "Sledgehammer of Plot" than in 1969’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. "Benito Mussolini is a great man!" is the line uttered on a hard scene cut by the titular lead character (Maggie Smith, Best Actress) who teaches young girls at the Marcia Blane private school in 1930’s Edinburgh, Scotland. To call Brodie a liberal would be an understatement of momentous proportions; Brodie cares very little about history, politics or how the world works, devoting her time and attention to the arts and "beauty," the latter of which she values above all. Her students should be learning valuable information and life skills, but Brodie is more intent on modeling them in her own image to perpetuate the idea that one needn’t follow the rules of society or care about consequences if they stand in the way of beauty and love. Brodie sees herself as a revolutionary, fighting the rigid conservatory that employs her to cast young ladies into a sexually restraining caste. There is some truth to this, but Brodie isn’t really as interested in fighting tyranny as she is in having beautiful, sexy fun. Taunting her fellow instructors to betray their matrimonial vows, she bounces between teachers, and later sets up pupil Jenny, the most beautiful of her select five girls, to be her lover by proxy to one faculty member. Constant claims that she is "in her prime" underlie the fact that Brodie’s life is a realistically a failure; a woman so devoted to art, love, etc. is trapped in a conservative school teaching useless facts as she continually refuses to settle down and find true love. Part of her reason for setting Jenny up with Mr. Lloyd, as well as assigning futures to her other pet pupils, is to live vicariously through them, including a rather deadly tryst supporting the fascist Franco. Sandy (Pamela Franklin) is the key to Brodie’s undoing, a "Brodie Girl" smart enough to see that her instructor’s ridiculously misguided politics and views on society are far more dangerous than the restrictions imposed by the Marcia Blane lifestyle. The movie’s final scene where Brodie and Sandy go head to head in marvelous in its construction, as two tremendous actresses deliver one of the best written scenes I have ever laid my eyes and ears upon. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a slow paced, sharply written tragedy about a woman born thirty years ahead of her time, unable to realize that sometimes there’s a reason truth gets in the way of beauty.