Romancing the Stone (1984)

 

Romancing the Stone is a great hybrid of romantic comedy and action-adventure film. It’s a sexy film with lots of gunfire, some physical comedy, and even a few crocodiles. It also marked the first movie pairing of Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas (with Danny DeVito along for the ride, as usual). They would later appear together in The Jewel of the Nile and The War of the Roses, but Romancing the Stone set a template for their future film interactions. They don’t like or even trust each other at first, but they begin to fall in love, and the film is as much about their relationship as it is the outline of the major plot. Turner plays Joan Wilder, a romance novelist living a pretty dull life with her cat. She’s not having any actual adventures; she just writes about them. Douglas is an actual adventurer, the perfectly named Jack Dalton, who smuggles exotic birds; he’s making his way through the jungle, one small town or village at a time. When Joan’s sister is kidnapped and taken to Colombia by the hapless brothers Ira (Zack Norman) and Ralph (DeVito), she crosses paths with Jack and attempts to enlist his help in rescuing her sister. She has to promise to pay him what she has left in traveler’s cheques once they’re both stranded in the jungle. Throughout the film, there’s a clear example of a McGuffin (one of Hitchcock’s favorite devices) in this treasure map to the location of a large emerald called El Corazon (“The Heart”), but really what matters here is the interaction between Turner and Douglas. It’s somewhat incidental that the map came from her murdered brother-in-law, and now everyone, including another drug lord named Col. Zolo, keeps looking for Turner because she’s in possession of it. Turner is very sexy here, and she becomes looser as the movie progresses and her inhibitions around Douglas’s Jack lower. She’s so delightful when she finds one of her fans in a small village, a local drug lord named Juan who helps them escape capture. Douglas, by comparison, was always a bit of a lech in his movies during this period. A look at his facial expressions seems to tell you his intentions with Joan. And that raises one of the central concerns of the film’s narrative: Does he love her, or is he just an opportunist? Has he started to have feelings for her, or does he just want to find the treasure of El Corazon himself? Romancing the Stone likes to tease viewers with the nature of their relationship, and it’s a delight to watch them bicker ruthlessly and then enjoy each other’s company.

Oscar Nomination: Best Film Editing

Jurassic Park (1993)

The most important factor in making Jurassic Park a huge success is how realistically the dinosaurs appear to be. If it weren’t for Steven Spielberg and the rest of the film’s crew using the best of computer-generated imagery, the film wouldn’t be as powerful as it is. Sure, we want to see imperiled humans—and if there’s a little bit of romance and perhaps some competing ideas for how to survive, so much the better—but if those humans are running from dinosaurs that look fake, then we’re going to be less invested in their outcome. And Jurassic Park didn’t win the Oscar for Best Visual Effects for nothing. Was it even a contest against Cliffhanger? Maybe The Nightmare Before Christmas had a shot, but it should have had the opportunity to be named Best Animated Feature, a category the Academy Awards wouldn’t create for another eight years, but that’s getting off topic. Jurassic Park is rather canny in its revealing of the first onscreen dinosaur, a brachiosaurus, about twenty minutes into the action. From that moment on, our attention is most enraptured when we get to see the dinosaurs in action, no matter the human cost involved. The plot is relatively simple, actually. Richard Attenborough’s John Hammond has populated a remote island near Costa Rica with dinosaurs. He and a team of scientists have extracted dinosaur DNA from insects preserved in amber and hatched a lot of dangerous beasts (and a few gentle ones). However, he has to demonstrate to the park’s investors that the island will be a safe location for a sort of amusement park. Hammond enlists the aid of Sam Neill’s Dr. Alan Grant, a paleontologist, and Dr. Ellie Sattler, a paleobotanist, to help him support his vision. The investors’ attorney brings along Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum being his most frustratingly Goldblum-ian), a mathematician in love with chaos theory. They’re amazed by what they see but also fearful of what could happen when humans and dinosaurs start to encounter each other. It doesn’t take long for a tour of the park, now including Hammond’s two grandchildren along for the ride, to go badly awry. The park’s chief computer programmer, Dennis (Wayne Knight, just as wonderfully unctuous here as he was Seinfeld), plans to steal some DNA samples for one of Hammond’s rivals, and he sabotages the security systems, and then the fun begins. The attack by the Tyrannosaurus rex is justifiably famous, a masterpiece of editing that places the viewer in a series of uncomfortable positions, sometimes as witness, sometimes as victim, sometimes as attacker. I’ve used it multiple times in my film studies classes. However, as scary as the T-rex is, the velociraptors are truly the stars of this first film of what became a hugely successful franchise. The raptors are clever and dangerous, and their attacks are relentless. They pop up at the most surprising of times, and it’s a visual delight to see them square off against the T-rex at the film’s end. Jurassic Park does feature a couple of moments of gentle sweetness. Neill’s Grant winds up caring for the children as they make their way back to the safety of headquarters even though he didn’t much like children at the film’s beginning. Yet those kinds of moments are overshadowed by ones like the scene where three raptors track down the children in the kitchen of the visitor center. Jurassic Park was Spielberg’s “other” film from 1993, his more famous artistic achievement being the Best Picture winner Schindler’s List. Pairing the two films does allow us to see the range of his talents, from well-crafted popular entertainment to serious-minded and thoughtful dramas.

Oscar Wins: Best Sound, Best Sound Effects Editing, and Best Visual Effects 

Casino Royale (1967)

 

The film version of Casino Royale from 1967 is most definitely not the serious-minded film with Daniel Craig from 2006. This adaptation is much sillier, a goofy parody of the four Bond films (with Sean Connery) that had already appeared during the 1960s. Sir James Bond (played with his usual debonair air by David Niven) has retired from service as 007, but spies from various countries—Great Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, and France—have been disappearing, so he’s pressed back into service. What follows is a series of explosions, killings, quirky gadgets, and the usual barrage of other spy movie stereotypes, just what you might expect in a Bond film. However, Casino Royale also features some trippy psychedelic visuals and cameos by such movie luminaries as George Raft, Peter O’Toole, and Jean Paul Belmondo. Even a young and already stunning Jacqueline Bissett (billed as “Jacky Bissett”) gets a brief scene where she seduces one of the several James Bonds the film includes. Casino Royale also has extended performances from some great stars. My favorite performance is by Deborah Kerr, who plays M’s widow with the thickest of Scottish brogues and lots of homicidal daughters. Her part of the story involves an attempt to kill Bond after a night of drinking and haggis-eating and dancing and physical competition—pretty strange stuff overall—and that’s even before the day-after-the-funeral grouse hunt. In fact, many of the film’s narrative elements make no sense other than as a way to lampoon the more serious Bond films. For example, when Niven takes over Britain’s spy agency, he thinks they need to find a Bond who can resist women as a way to counteract the image being perpetuated by the “other” Bond films – well, actually, the weakness for sexy women seems to be linked to the disappearance of the spies. This moment does give a lot of beautiful women the opportunity to earn the title of “Bond girl” and for Terence Cooper to kiss a lot of them. Arguably, the most famous Bond girl of them all, Ursula Andress of Dr. No fame, gets recruited by Niven’s Sir James to get the author of a book on how to play baccarat, Evelyn Tremble (Peter Sellers) to help defeat Orson Welles’ Le Chiffre at the title casino. Welles’ character, you see, is funding SMERSH, the group responsible for kidnapping all of the spies from around the world. He’s also, inexplicably, performing magic tricks at the baccarat table, much to the amazement of the assembled crowd. Andress and Sellers seem to be having the most fun among the actors, Andress winking at her iconic status here as a rich and extravagantly wardrobed double agent who’s always a step ahead of the men she encounters and Sellers getting a couple of moments to wear costumes much like his famed character Inspector Clouseau from the Pink Panther movies. The film does add a nice touch in its inclusion of a younger actors to link characters to the more famous Bond franchise. Miss Moneypenny’s daughter (Barbara Bouchet) is now the new Moneypenny, and Sir James recruits his daughter with Mata Hari, Mata Hari (Joanna Pettet), to help him infiltrate the German school that trains female spies. Most important to the plot, though, is Woody Allen as Sir James’ nephew Jimmy. He only has a few minutes on screen, but his role is integral to tidying up as best it can the convoluted and scattered threads of the plot. By the time the American cavalry—on horseback—shows up, followed by a group of dancing Native Americans, a viewer might be exhausted from having watched an abduction by a spaceship and a gang of gun-toting women in minidresses. The visual overload is quite astonishing. Casino Royale could have easily been nominated for its costume design, which is gloriously mod, or its production design, which is spectacular, but it had to settle for just one nomination: Best Original Song for “The Look of Love,” which plays as the romantic theme when Sellers and Ursula Andress are seducing each other. (Well, to be fair, she’s doing more of the work.) It’s sung in the film by one of the greatest singers of all time, Dusty Springfield, and its inclusion is a true highlight. By the way, the instrumental theme, written by Burt Bacharach and performed by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, is also amazing.

Oscar Nomination: Best Original Song (“The Look of Love”)