The Devil's Own (1997)

Film: The Devil's Own (1997)

Stars: Harrison Ford, Brad Pitt, Margaret Colin, Ruben Blades, Treat Williams, George Hearn

Director: Alan J. Pakula

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Harrison Ford: click here to learn more about Mr. Ford (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

By the late 1990's, Harrison Ford was almost sixty years old, and despite decades of action films, he was starting to show that age.  Instead of playing young rebels & sexy professors onscreen, he was playing the president in movies like Air Force One.  Ford was still an incredibly bankable star (Air Force One was a huge hit & would have long pop culture legs-it's still one of the films that's most name-checked for him), but it was also obvious that gravy train was about to end, and you see that in a film like The Devil's Own released in the same year.  Ford himself had seen a previous generation's action hero serve as his mentor in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade with Sean Connery playing his father as Connery's career had started to fade.  Here, he was now taking over the father figure role, and young Brad Pitt is the sexy upstart who is at the center of the film even if Harrison Ford gets top billing.  The result is a movie that doesn't really work, and would unfortunately be the harbinger of a lot of Ford films to come.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Frankie McGuire (Pitt), a member of the IRA (Irish Republican Army) who saw his father gunned down for sympathizing with the republicans in the 1970's, and has now joined them & is trying to buy missiles in the United States.  He does so by staying with an NYPD Sergeant Tom O'Meara (Ford), and his family, and we get a few cute scenes where Frankie & Tom bond over shooting pool (and his daughters all develop schoolgirl crushes on the comely Frankie).  But the movie takes a dark turn when the actual task at-hand, buying the missiles from a violent Irish mobster named Billy Burke (Williams) starts to end in bloodshed.  The film becomes a standoff between Frankie, who inadvertently has made Tom's family the target of violent criminals, and Tom himself, now trying to save Frankie as he knows he's headed for either prison or death at this point.

The film's politics are a bit hard to decipher, and haven't aged super well.  The Good Friday Agreements that would happen the following year make trying to decipher which side you were on very different than in the 1990's when the violence in Ireland would've been on the nightly news regularly (I would assume a lot of modern audiences wouldn't entirely know what to do with Pitt's character here).  The film also glorifies the "honest cop" who still lies to get his partner off for murder, and Ford's character in an era were law enforcement is not universally shorthand for being the "good guys" is a bit tough, and honestly indicates in part why the action genre struggled to stay super relevant into the 21st Century.  This bit also feels tagged on, which if you read about the behind-the-scenes drama of this movie, it was (and caused friction between Ford & Pitt, who would never work together again).

But the bigger problem might be the film gets really dull after a while.  There's not enough new here-the film could've used more scenes with the two men together, having them play off of one another and giving us a better sense of their relationship before they start pointing guns at the other guy.  Much has been made about Pitt's (shaky) Irish accent through the years for this film, and I'm not going to pretend it's good, but Pitt is so beautiful and so easy onscreen I don't really care that he doesn't sound super authentic.  Ford, as well, is a solid leading man but he doesn't take to the complicated aspects of the film, and is too stoic compared to Pitt, and honestly (in my opinion) gets outplayed by him.  Ford is so serious that he borders on two-dimensional.  Gone is the easy charm of Indiana Jones and Star Wars, and we don't have the thrills & stakes of something like The Fugitive (nor the actorly sophistication of The Conversation or The Mosquito Coast).

This would in part be the future of Harrison Ford as he would continue to work.  With the exception of What Lies Beneath (I wish he'd done more horror in his career, as this film is terrific), the next few years would be a series of missteps, critically & financially, even in the action genre with pictures like Firewall and K-19: The Widowmaker (I actually saw this in theaters, making me one of the few who did, and found my ticket stub for it randomly the other day...if my brother makes it this far in the review, curious if he remembers which theater we saw this in).  Much of the next few decades would involve revisiting roles (to differing success) in the Star Wars, Blade Runner, & Indiana Jones franchises, but by-and-large, Ford would never really recapture the glamour of either his action hero heyday nor of his unique acting ability in auteur-driven dramas, and in the past few years his best work has been in television.

Next month, we're going to shift to an actor who was very much Ford's action star peer, and like Ford would end up watching his once impenetrable action hero career go down in flames in the late 1990's.  But while Ford would go on to middling success in a series of notable flops, this actor would encounter a second act so unlikely, it would've been scoffed had it been in one his movies (proving that occasionally, truth IS stranger than fiction).

Patriot Games (1992)

Film: Patriot Games (1992)

Stars: Harrison Ford, Anne Archer, Patrick Bergin, SEan Bean, Thora Birch, Samuel L. Jackson, James Fox, Richard Harris

Director: Phillip Noyce

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Harrison Ford: click here to learn more about Mr. Ford (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

The past two weeks we have focused on Harrison Ford as he might've been.  With The Conversation, we talked about his unique gifts for character work, giving us an important smarmy (but crucial) character in Gene Hackman's journey in the picture, and then with The Mosquito Coast we saw him attempt to escape the everyman hero that he personified in Han Solo & Indiana Jones to tremendous effect.  But Harrison Ford is not an actor you automatically name-check as a great actor-you think of him as a great movie star, and one who is relatively easy to imitate.  So this week, we're really getting into the era of Ford's "get off my plane!" level of ubiquity.  In the 1990's, Ford was a constant presence in movies and basically competed solely with Tom Cruise as the most invincible of stars at the box office.  Everything he touched would turn to gold, but while Cruise would occasionally challenge himself as an actor in these pictures, Ford didn't.  This isn't to say that Ford made bad movies during the era (ending in the late 1990's, which is where we'll close our month with him next week), but he wasn't racking up Oscar nominations like Cruise was, and most of his films are generic even if they would make buckets of money.  One of the best examples of them, and one of the few I hadn't seen yet (I was alive in the 1990's, and my mom loved Harrison Ford...I saw most of his stuff) is Patriot Games, the first of two outings that Ford would take as CIA analyst Jack Ryan, his other other franchise lead after the two I already name-checked.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Jack Ryan (Ford), a man who used to work for the CIA and is now teaching history at the US Naval Academy.  He, his wife Cathy (Archer), and daughter Sally (Birch) inadvertently witness an IRA terrorist attack on Lord William Holmes (Fox), in which Jack saves Lord Holmes life.  Several members, specifically Sean Miller (Bean) survive Jack's retaliation, though, and are on a quest for revenge against both Lord Holmes (who keeps having people around him dying) and against the Ryans, which escalates to kidnapping attempts on his wife & daughter.  This all ends with us realizing that Holmes' assistant has been a secret informant, and sets up Sean to kill both Lord Holmes and the Ryans in the same party...before Jack saves the day, killing the assistant and Sean Miller in the process.

It's worth noting that this is technically the sequel to another movie, honestly a better one: The Hunt for Red October, where the Jack Ryan character was played by Alec Baldwin (we'll actually discuss this movie a bit before the end of the month in the context of the 1990 Oscar Viewing Project, which I should be done with by next Saturday if all things go according to plan).  A lot of speculation from those in the know (and Baldwin himself) has been stirred about as to why Baldwin, sixteen years Ford's junior at the time and a much more logical choice for a new action franchise, was ousted, with everything from Ford being a bigger star (who had a host of contracts with the studio they were trying to pay off) to Baldwin's salary demands (and legendarily diva-like behavior during his leading man era) all contributing to this bump, but it did happen, and it changes the tenor of the movies.  Baldwin's screen persona was always a bit more seductive & (save for Han Solo) wrier than Ford's, and it shows that Patriot Games is kind of dull.

It's not that it's necessarily bad, because it's not.  The supporting cast (actors like Harris, Bean, & Jackson) are all made up of properly good actors, and Ford knows how to command a screen, but it's also generic.  There's nothing really special about Jack Ryan, nothing that we get to know-this feels like he's just playing Harrison Ford in the way that someone like Arnold Schwarzenegger would become famous for at the same time-not giving us anything beyond what's expected.  Ford, though, was a better actor than Arnold, and it's a pity this is what he has spent much of the latter part of his career doing.  It says something that while Ford was called upon decades after-the-fact to play both Han Solo and Indiana Jones, because no one could imagine anyone else playing these parts (apologies to Alden Ehrenreich), by 2002 when they were making the long-awaited sequel to Clear and Present Danger (Ford's second outing as Jack Ryan), it was Ben Affleck, not Ford, who ended up playing the part.  Had he not been going through one of the messiest Hollywood divorces of the era, Alec Baldwin might've enjoyed the karmic revenge of Ford finally losing out on his part to a younger actor.

The Mosquito Coast (1986)

Film: The Mosquito Coast (1986)

Stars: Harrison Ford, Helen Mirren, Andre Gregory, River Phoenix, Martha Plimpton

Director: Peter Weir

Oscar History: No nominations, though both Ford and composer Maurice Jarre got Golden Globe nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Harrison Ford: click here to learn more about Mr. Ford (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Harrison Ford was not the first actor associated with a specific role or being unable to escape from it.  But in the modern era of filmmaking (i.e. post-Jaws) he really personified the actor whose characters ended up being too popular for him to stop doing them. In the 1980's, this meant that Ford made a number of films as both Han Solo & Indiana Jones (from 1980-84, he made four of them alone, and only took a break for Blade Runner, a rather difficult shoot for the actor despite its later cult status).  But unlike the 1990's, when Ford's dramatic attempts outside of action-adventure would become something of a source of ridicule (and not inspire a lot of critical hosannas), in the 1980's he had a lot of acclaim on this front, particularly in the movie of Peter Weir.  In 1985, he starred in the blockbuster hit Witness, which won him his first (and to date only) Academy Award nomination for Best Actor.  In 1986, he appeared in another dramatic departure from Weir, but unlike Witness it was a flop (he'd recover pretty quickly two years later with the massive success of Working Girl, a movie which got pretty much everyone in the cast but him an Oscar nomination).  The Mosquito Coast is a unique film though (and Ford has frequently cited it as his favorite) given how well it captured a certain type of toxic masculinity, and how brittle & unrelenting Ford's portrayal of the main character is right up until the end credits.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Allie Fox (Ford), an inventor who hates the American Dream, capitalism, and a global economy that relies upon foreign industries to keep it afloat (there's an early scene where he eviscerates a shop owner for carrying products made in Japan, which in the 1980's you can't entirely tell if this is just him leaning in on Reagan conservatism or makes him truly xenophobic).  After yet another employer being disappointed with his impressive inventions (in this case a house that can make ice), he decides to move his family to the jungles of Belize, where he buys a village in the rainforest.  Allie, his wife Margot (Mirren), whom he constantly calls "Mother," and their four children, including eldest son Charlie (Phoenix) initially find success introducing his impressive inventions to the jungle.  But his paranoia starts to settle in.  He convinces his family that a nuclear war has struck America, destroying the country, and when a group of rebels take over his camp, he murders them (not in the way he planned, initially wanting to freeze them to death but instead having them burned to death in an explosion that pollutes the river).  Eventually he drives his family mad with loyalty tests, and is shot by a missionary whom Allie is convinced is running a Christian concentration camp, killing him as his family finally finds freedom.

It's easy to see, watching the film, why it didn't resonate with Reagan America, even with (or maybe especially because of) Harrison Ford in the lead.  The movie is dark, and shows a toxicity in the male ego that you don't usually find here.  In the 1980's, with Reagan promising a return of the American Dream for white families (and in particular white men) while widening income gaps and unsteady unemployment numbers took its toll on Middle America figures like the Fox family.  Huey Long had said that "every man is a king" and in the 1980's that was the reigning theology for conservative men, and while Allie Fox presents as being anti-capitalist, he is deeply conservative about gender & family life, and that shows in the way that he blames women and people of color for his failures to be truly successful the way he trains his children to think he should be.  It's hard not to watch this film, and in particular the way that he treats his wife Margot (not physically abusing her, but clearly indulging in what we'd now consider emotional abuse) and think of the MAGA movement, and the way that it tries to get back to this era...knowing full well that it is filled with angry men who still blame the world for their failures.

Ford's portrayal of Allie Fox is really good, and it's in part because he doesn't let up on him.  Most actors, particularly ones who are super reliant upon audiences wanting to root for them, wouldn't have allowed their characterization to be so unsympathetic.  They would've given him redemption, or an apology scene with Helen Mirren at the end of the movie.  But thankfully Weir doesn't do that, and we get with Ford's performance a broken man, one you might understand where he's coming from because he's the product of his environment (capitalism can tear us all apart in the end), but who is also so egocentric he doesn't acknowledge the harm he's doing because it's his harm.  In a year where men like Graham Platner (who put so much of the blame for their failings on others rather than himself) are being celebrated by the left (and Donald Trump, doing the same thing, is a deity for the right), it's hard not to think that Mosquito Coast and Ford's layered performance aren't ahead of their time.

OVP: The Conversation (1974)

Film: The Conversation (1974)

Stars: Gene Hackman, John Cazale, Allen Garfield, Cindy Williams, Frederic Forrest, Harrison Ford, Teri Garr

Director: Francis Ford Coppola

Oscar History: 3 nominations (Best Picture, Original Screenplay, Sound)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Harrison Ford: click here to learn more about Mr. Ford (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Harrison Ford's public persona has long been of a man who didn't really want to be a movie star.  A lot of this, I have long-suspected, is at least partially untrue (otherwise why do it, especially when he became bonkers rich & didn't really need to do it anymore...after all, his wife is also a talented actor who now rarely works).  But it is interesting that Ford's fame came relatively late.  The role that made him a movie star was Star Wars, which was released just days before his 35th birthday. For comparison's sake with some of his 1970's peers, Al Pacino at that age had several Oscar nominations and the Godfather franchise, Dustin Hoffman had been Ben Braddock & Ratso Rizzo, and Jack Nicholson & Peter Fonda had both boarded a motorcycle into legend.  Ford spent much of the 1970's balancing his time between small roles in movies and making furniture for people like Joan Didion, Valerie Harper, & George Lucas.  Ford's movie career, though, is really interesting because he appeared in a lot of interesting movies, among them Michelangelo Antonioni's controversial Zabriskie Point, and three Best Picture nominees: American Graffiti, Apocalypse Now, and today's film The Conversation.  For all of the talk about Ford at one point before Han Solo nearly quitting the industry to work as a high-profile carpenter, the more intriguing idea might be what he did in this film: taking on the role of distinctive, very handsome character actor in important auteur-driven features.

(Spoilers Ahead) The Conversation is a movie best headed into with you knowing as little as is humanly possible, so while I provide a spoiler alert on all of my reviews because I generally want to know as little as possible about all movies I'm going to, this one in particular it helps to go in blind so I'll reiterate that now.  The movie follows Harry Caul (Hackman), a man who runs a service that essentially follows people and records them for money (it is not lost on me that The Conversation, which competed with Chinatown for Best Picture in 1974, bears a striking resemblance to the Roman Polanski film as both are about private investigators who uncover more than they expected from a routine case).  Unlike Jake Gittes, Harry Caul does not advertise and is not well-known for his work.  He is, instead, anonymous to the point of unhealthy, keeping everything about him at a distance to the point his girlfriend (Garr) doesn't ever visit his apartment and he doesn't even have his own phone.  This is driven by wanting to avoid retribution, but also the very real threat of violence in his career.  Similar to Chinatown (again) there are allusions to a previous case throughout the film that the audience only understands to be too horrific to mention, and that haunt both detectives to the point they are constantly in fear of repeating it.

The Conversation is considered a landmark film, but because Francis Ford Coppola had it come out the same year The Godfather, Part II (one of the greatest movies ever made), it always feels like it doesn't get its due, and so I wasn't entirely sure what to expect headed into this-would it be a really handsome movie, one that stands up but can't compare with a picture as perfect as Godfather II, or would it be just as exceptional.  Again, similar to Chinatown, it's not clear until the last moments what's happening, and it's also not clear where The Conversation will land in that comparison.  But as the movie concludes, you realize it's also a true masterpiece.  We understand as the film ends that Harry has no idea what he's walked into, and what he's helped cause.  He assumes that the conversation between Frederic Forrest & Cindy Williams at the beginning of the movie is of a couple that might be having an affair, and becomes concerned when he uncovers (while listening to the clips that he initially won't hand over to a man known as "the Director's" assistant without first meeting the Director himself) that a part of the clips that he couldn't initially hear says "he'd kill us if he got the chance."  When he meets the Director (played by an uncredited Robert Duvall) he becomes worried for the young couple's safety as it's clear Cindy Williams is the Director's wife.  But as we learn in the waning moments of the film, he's missed something on the tapes-the emphasis in Forrest's reading of the word "us."

Because as the film ends, it's a case where Frederic Forrest has murdered Robert Duvall's husband with help from his lover, leaving all of the money (and secret organization he has) to Cindy Williams, and leaving them the opportunity to end up together.  The movie's sound work is legendary (and Oscar-nominated) for a reason, as not only is the entire setup with Hackman's Harry filled with us getting whirs & blurs from the recording equipment, but also the film tells in flashback narrative things the audience will have missed.  The film clearly inspired everything from The Usual Suspects to Severance (which borrows heavily from The Conversation's score), and you see why-this is a movie that shows paranoia is justified...and cannot be resolved.  We end the movie with Harry knowing he is being watched, knowing that he can't escape or be safely private...and having to give in to that to not go mad.

Harrison Ford's role is a key component & a crucial part of this story, even if he's only in about three scenes.  He plays the Director's assistant, and plays him with a level of bureaucratic cool that you kind of just assume he's a jackass (also according to most reports, Ford played him as gay which kind of comes across in the way he's super bitchy in a way you don't find a male character in the 1970's, even if there's no hint of this other than him wearing a stylish green suit in one scene that Ford bought with his own money), one who has gotten to this position through being absurdly handsome and honestly it's the sort of character you assume you don't need to pay attention to as the movie progresses.  Because I am writing this about Ford, though, I was paying attention, and it gives you a whole other angle here.  Ford's Martin Stett is the only figure in the film who 100% knows everything that's going on we learn as the film goes by-he works for the Director, but he's also clearly aware of the affair, and given that he's still working for Frederic Forrest & Cindy Williams in the end, it's possible he orchestrated all of this in connection with them.  The paranoia seeps into the actual film...was this all a setup to use Harry, kill the Director, and give the young couple everything they wanted?  Only Ford's Stett, who calls Hackman in the end to tell him he's being watched, knows for certain, and makes him the true antagonist of the picture.  Ford is good in this, and as we'll talk about next week, that layered acting ability didn't totally diminish when his visage started to adorn the postered walls of teenage boys, but as I said above-it's hard not to think of Ford in the same way we think of someone like Robert Duvall or John Cazale, someone who added extra layers to already great movies, as a supporting character actor, while watching The Conversation.

Saturdays with the Stars: Harrison Ford

Each month of 2026 we are looking at an actor or actress who found their fame in action films, fighting bad guys & saving the day.  Last month, we spoke about Bruce Lee, an actor who (like Steve McQueen before him) died relatively young and forged a type of movie star that hadn't really been seen before.  This month, as promised, we are going to start a six-month run of actors who made virtually all of their successful films post-1975.  To start that, we'll begin with the one guy who did have two big movies before 1975 (American Graffiti & The Conversation), but who would become synonymous with two characters that would reshape the cinematic landscape after Jaws, and make him the movie star's movie star, an action hero that the whole family could root for, even if his prickly public demeanor might bristle at such superlatives.  This month's star is Harrison Ford.

Born in Chicago, Ford (like Bruce Lee last month) had a clear path before him if he followed his parents' footsteps into show business.  His mother was a radio actress, and his father a former actor & advertising executive.  He grew up in a mixed faith household, his mother being Jewish while his father was Irish-Catholic, and both were quite progressive, something that Ford would carry for the rest of his life (the rare action film star of the modern era that is very much a Democrat).  Though incredibly handsome, Ford's initial forays into entertainment were middling, getting bit roles in westerns while George Hamilton & James Caan (both roughly the same age as Ford) got top-billing in the same pictures.  So frustrated with acting was he that he had a side gig as a carpenter (one of his clients included writer Joan Didion), and were it not for George Lucas seeing his potential in American Graffiti, he might have made that his life.

But Lucas saw something in Ford that soon the entire world would, as he put him as Han Solo in Star Wars, a movie that would make him a household name, while Lucas (as a producer) a few years later would give Ford the role he might be most synonymous with, Indiana Jones.  These two movies launched highly lucrative franchises for Ford, but they were hardly the only movies that really commanded the public's attention.  Throughout the 1980's and 90's, Ford was one of the most bankable stars in Hollywood, particularly when it comes to launching action franchises.  So famous is Ford that part of me almost didn't want to include him here because I struggled to come up with four major films that I hadn't seen of his (according to Letterboxd, I have seen 28 of his films).  So while we won't review Star Wars and Indiana Jones (as I've seen them all many times), we will talk about them, alongside some of Ford's other biggest pictures of the era, including two forays into more serious acting.

OVP: Star Wars: The Revenge of Skywalker (2019)

Film: Star Wars: The Revenge of Skywalker (2019)
Stars: Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill, Adam Driver, Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Ian McDiarmid, Billy Dee Williams
Director: JJ Abrams
Oscar History: 3 nominations (Best Score, Visual Effects, Sound Editing)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

In recent years, it has become clearer and clearer why I prefer film to television.  In a supposed "Golden Age," TV frequently repeats itself, and seems incapable of telling just one, comprehensive story.  The medium takes complete narratives such as the first seasons of The Handmaid's Tale and Big Little Lies, stretching them despite perfect endings after just one season.  Film is complete-it gives you proper endings with actual stakes, as has been illustrated continually with this excellent cinematic annum.  The question becomes at what point do franchises struggle with the same question-when do they risk the pitfalls of television?  We saw that earlier this year with Spider-Man: Far From Home, when it became apparent after 22 films that Marvel doesn't really have anything left in its arsenal but retreads and lesser characters with the same plot lines (it doesn't seem like a mistake that they're going back-to-the-past for their next entry of Black Widow).  Here we have what some will claim to be the "final" chapter in the Skywalker fantasy, but one with a lot of dangling storylines and myriad characters to get back into in an "Episode X" if these actors don't make it in as proper movie stars (not everyone gets to be Harrison Ford).  But if this is the end of the series (and wouldn't it be amazing if it was and they actually respected the tale without trying to bilk it for more cash?), what kind of ending do we have for arguably the most important series in modern cinema?

(Spoilers Ahead) The film focuses on the final battle between, initially, Kylo Ren (Driver) and Rey (Ridley), who is fully immersed in her Jedi training with Leia (Fisher) as her mentor.  She is hoping to find Emperor Palpatine (McDiarmid), who is apparently not dead (as we'd assumed from Return of the Jedi), but instead the mastermind behind Snoke and has been guiding Kylo Ren this whole time.  It also turns out, as we continue, that Rey is not "the child of no one," but instead Palpatine's granddaughter.  Rey struggles with this, as her fight with the dark side takes on a similar path to that of Luke Skywalker in, again, Return of the Jedi, but she ultimately chooses to side with the good guys, winning over Kylo Ren before he dies (with the help of Harrison Ford in a cameo as Han Solo, almost certainly his final appearance in the series), and helping to take down her grandfather in an epic battle.

There are a lot of problems with Rise of Skywalker, so let's get the good out first-it looks great.  The special effects here are top drawer, some of the best of the year.  Standouts include Rey literally riding gigantic waves, and the entire water-soaked battle with Kylo Ren, as well as the final battle between the Empire and the Rebels.  It's become something we just expect from this franchise that the visual effects are top-drawer, but 2019 hosted visual effects that felt kind of lazy or appreciated a bit too generously; this is classic, impressively-designed special effects work, which shouldn't be dismissed as it becomes a rarity.  Also, in a year where we were expected to suspend belief with less-than-impressive "de-aging" in The Irishman, Captain Marvel, and Gemini Man, for a brief moment I was stunned at how good the de-aging work was for Carrie Fisher, until I realized that they used unused footage from past films to put together her scenes; this was the correct choice.

But the rest of Rise of Skywalker is kind of a disaster.  The latest episodes have always struggled with defining their new characters outside of the shadows of their previous iterations, giving the best moments of the new series to Fisher, Ford, and Mark Hamill.  Without that nostalgic pull (since Ford & Hamill's characters have died, and Fisher died in real life), this film needs its new characters to do the heavy-lifting, and that's not really something they've built a foundation toward.  Finn & Poe are both ancillary characters, at best-suddenly Poe is a horn-dog and Finn is just sort of there, promising information to Rey but never actually delivering it.  Kelly Marie Tran's Rose is so sidelined in this movie you basically wonder why the series even introduced her.  The film has nostalgic moments, involving Fisher & Ford, but they don't ring as meaningful as they did in the past films, the Fisher one obviously not being the franchise's fault (it's clear she had a different role in this film than they intended before her real-life death), but the writers never found a proper solution to handle her death.  The only time that felt similar to some of the high points of the previous film on this front was the first appearance of Lando (Williams)...who promptly disappears from the story, an indication that he was more a tag-on to the story because of Fisher's death (suddenly depriving the studio of a major link to the initial franchise) rather than because it suited the plot.

Rey has been drawn better than pretty much any other new character, and as a result was the best chance this film had to distinguish itself in a way similar to The Last Jedi standing apart from traditional Star Wars action-adventures, but the decision to make her a Palpatine falls flat.  This feels like a direct reaction to the fans hating on The Last Jedi, but it's a good indication that giving fans everything they want is a TERRIBLE idea.  JJ Abrams likely shouldn't have taken back over the franchise here-he had a vision that was completely disparate from Rian Johnson, and basically ignores the intriguing directions that Johnson took the characters in Episode VIII.  As a result, this is a jumbled mess, full of expository plots & repetitive action scenes.  The emotional stakes aren't strong (the only hero character to die is Leia, which pretty much anyone would have assumed would have to happen considering real-life implications), and by bringing back a bad guy who had already died, they showed they never really had faith in the new universe they crafted, just in its links to the older series.  It's hard for me to hate any Star Wars movie, but this one definitely is met with a gigantic eye roll, and my wish that they retire the Skywalker saga going forward if they are going to invest in a galaxy far, far away.

OVP: Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

Film: Blade Runner 2049 (2017)
Stars: Ryan Gosling, Harrison Ford, Ana de Armas, Sylvia Hoeks, Robin Wright, Mackenzie Davis
Director: Denis Villeneuve
Oscar History: 5 nominations/2 wins (Best Cinematography*, Production Design, Sound Editing, Sound Mixing, Visual Effects*)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

The world did not need a sequel to Blade Runner, but it got one anyway.  That was the thought that kept running through my head about a "film classic" that I didn't really love when I finally saw it, but has so greatly influenced the way we look at the movies since (seriously-name another movie that has more influenced set design in Sci-Fi in the years since, I dare you), that it deserved some respect.  The reason for this I'll get to in a second (but if you're a fan of the original film, you'll know what I'm talking about right away), and why I largely avoided the movie itself when it came out (also the length-I have places to be, people).  But a sequel happened regardless, and as it seems certain to land 2-3 Oscar nominations so I figured it was time I head to a dollar theater to give it a shot.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie takes place thirty years after the original, with the world still a ghost town of its former self (hey, Trump's America-we could be in Blade Runner territory by 2019 at this rate, minus the belief in science), and with replicants now living amongst the human population, largely as slaves.  One of these replicants K (Gosling) is charged with taking out replicants that have gone rogue.  At one of his missions, he discovers the bones of a female replicant who died while trying to give birth, proving that replicants aren't sterile.  This of course ends up being Rachael (Sean Young) from the original film, who has had a child with Rick Deckard (Ford), still on the run and living in a post-apocalyptic Las Vegas.  The film results in a series of chases where K and Deckard, sometimes on the same side, sometimes on opposing, try and outrun Niander Wallace's (Jared Leto) henchmen (for lack of a better word), particularly the evil and sadistic Luv (Hoeks).  The film ends with K dying on the stairs, while Deckard gets to meet his daughter for the first time.

The movie is, well, kind of sloppy.  The first Blade Runner largely functioned well because there was a question hanging over the picture over whether or not Deckard was actually a replicant and didn't know it or not.  That question is essential to the film's core, and in particular its ambiguous ending.  By bringing back a (physically older, sorry Harrison) Deckard, we see that of course he wasn't a replicant, taking away one of the great mysteries of Science-Fiction.  That alone should have precluded this movie from being made.  By bringing him back, you get a more traditional sequel, but one that is reliant upon spooky-and-strange as its ambience, when pretty much everything is straight-forward.  There is no mystery, no ambiguity hanging over the film's ending and the characters that are enigmatic (particularly Niander and Luv) are too bland to care about.  Hoeks is trying her best as Luv, but never approaches, say, the intrigue of Pris from the original, which she's obviously borrowing from in this performance.  And Leto being asked to play a part this prone to scenery-chewing (it's clearly the Rutger Hauer stand-in), was a casting director foul that literally anyone could have seen coming; Leto overacts, over-emotes, and quite frankly is just terrible in this performance, continuing a post-Dallas Buyers Club streak of him being creepy off-screen and on.

The film's only lending card is the gargantuan and stylish special effects, which here it delivers.  The movie never sacrifices the motif of the original film, and works within its confines, so we don't get wall-to-wall dull CGI.  I loved the giant head motif, and the whitened tree in particular.  Roger Deakins' cinematography is sometimes spectacularly showy, to the point where you feel like you're being forced to watch shots so impressive the movie's plot gets washed out by the visuals, but complaining about someone being too good at their job feels a bit glib even for me, and this is another in a recent pantheon of marvelously-lensed movies from the man in desperate search of an Oscar.  I am not someone who gives a free pass to movies looking great as a bandaid over great plot (I'm more likely to forgive in the opposite direction), but I have to admit I'm not going to complain about its inevitable trio of Oscar nominations (and possibly wins) when they happen in the visual categories.  Otherwise, though, this is a dull affair that tainted a Sci-Fi classic's finale.

OVP: Blade Runner (1982)

Film: Blade Runner (1982)
Stars: Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, Darryl Hannah, Edward James Olmos
Director: Ridley Scott
Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Art Direction and Visual Effects)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Approaching a classic film is always a challenge.  Approaching a classic film that also doubles as a cult film, a picture so frequently referenced that it approaches you knowing nearly the entire film by the time you actually see it is something else entirely.  I actually dreaded in some ways finally encountering Blade Runner, a science fiction epic (arguably my favorite genre outside of detective noir, which this film also borrows from heavily), as I knew that I was either going to love it or find it lacking in so many ways, hoping that the film would give me its best but preparing for the worst.  My eventual opinion somehow landed in-between, a combination of both duly impressed but also wanting more after so much promise.

(Spoilers Ahead) For many of you the spoiler alert isn't necessary, but for the rest of you let me at least indulge for a second.  The film follows Deckard (Ford) in 2019 (the future is always disappointing when you compare it to what actually ends up happening isn't it...though if Trump gets elected maybe the apocalypse is in fact upon us).  Deckard is charged with "retiring" (killing) four different replicants (essentially advanced artificial intelligence creations) who have escaped and are now on Earth illegally, essentially hoping to have their lives extended.  Along the way, he falls in love with a replicant named Rachael (Young), who helps him retire one of the replicants that is trying to kill him.  Slowly-but-steadily the four replicants are killed by Deckard, who knows they only have a night or so to live without having some sort of technology that will extend their lives.  He ends with Roy Batty (Hauer), the leader of the robots, in a strange act actually save him, just to watch him die as his life expires.

The film combines a lot of elements of noir, and it's close enough to something that Stanley Kubrick would dream up that the film never lacks in terms of direction or suspense.  While it's clear that Hauer's Roy Batty will be the final remaining character, each of the different robots has their own personas and especially with Pris (Hannah) she's such a strong fighter that you half expect her to lay out Harrison Ford or at least run away from the contest.  The movie is spectacularly good at world-building-there's little confusion over the rules of this filmic world and everything feels authentic.  It's kind of staggering the film never had a sequel, and quite frankly a movie like this couldn't be made today without one on the docket (actually, a movie this original couldn't be made today, period, unless Christopher Nolan had stumbled across the Philip K. Dick novel and developed a penchant for it), but it gains so much by never answering some of the critical questions at the end of the picture.  The film exists unto itself, and with such distinctive characters and sets, it's easy to see why this became a cult movie classic.

My problem with the film is that the story, while complicated, never really gives us enough character to go with it.  Yes, the actors and sets are distinctive, but we never really get to know the robots enough to know what their motives are, and why they exist the way they do.  This wouldn't be a problem for the audience, except that Deckard is clearly assumed to be a robot himself, one who doesn't know it yet but is likely going to have a shut-down period in the near future.  The film is littered with hints of this, particularly the newest version of Ridley Scott's picture (this is a film with MANY different iterations).  By not exploring this a little bit more fully, we don't get to see the ways that Ford's Deckard ticks in comparison to those androids he's hunting down.  I'm fine with ambiguity in the ending (and man did Inception copy from that finale), but if you're going to leave a question that open-ended, you need to give us more from the characters (save perhaps Roy Batty) than just a truly awesome Halloween costume idea.

Those are my thoughts on this particular picture, which received two well-earned Oscar nominations (seriously-these were the exact categories this film deserved to be nominated in), but as this is a widely-celebrated cult classic I'd love to get inside of your head.  I plan on eventually seeing the film again, and while I engaged mostly at a surface-level, what a surface level to engage in-overall it's definitely a film that I'd recommend, even if I don't think I'll ever love it the way that other people did.

OVP: Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015)

Film: Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015)
Stars: Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Adam Driver, Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Lupita Nyong'o, Domhnall Gleeson, Max von Sydow
Director: JJ Abrams
Oscar History: 5 nominations (Best Original Score, Editing, Visual Effects, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Like every carbon-based life form on the planet, I too saw the new Star Wars movie this past weekend. In fact, I am still wearing my R2D2 shirt that I wore to the opening weekend this morning (I saw it Saturday so it's not quite as gross as it sounds).  The movies, which were a part of my childhood in a way that they were for many Millennials who saw the original trilogy when they were re-released for the twentieth anniversary, bring back a sense of nostalgia that seems to have been the theme of the year.  From Jurassic Park to Rocky, nostalgia at the movies and playing off of past love for a cinematic brand has been the best way to mine the box office and our pocketbooks for a Hollywood that continually wants to find a sure-thing (lest we forget that the Independence Day and Harry Potter franchises recently released new trailer installments).  Like many critics, I found the film itself to be an enjoyable and thrill-filled ride, one that reestablishes the world of Star Wars without alienating die-hard fans of the franchise (like JJ Abrams kind of did for some more devoted Star Trek fans) while still seeming accessible to those people who didn't just rewatch all of the original six movies for the 70th time.  Still, that doesn't mean the film isn't without its faults, and so we'll get into that juxtaposition right now.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film in many ways borrows from the original A New Hope, so much so that some (including myself) felt like they remade the original trilogy with just a complete rehaul of gender and racial backgrounds of the main characters.  Here, so far, we have Rey (Miller) taking on the Luke Skywalker role, Finn (Boyega) seemingly taking on a more robust Princess Leia position, and then of course there's can-he-be-in-everything Oscar Isaac as Poe, the scallywag who is clearly mining Han Solo while Adam Driver's Kylo Ren is the misguided son of Leia and Han and our Vader-like antagonist.  The film plays out in many ways just like this, with Rey discovered ala Luke on a lost planet, and we have Han Solo step into the role of Obi-Wan Kenobi for Finn and Rey as they try to take down the newly-risen Empire (for anyone who eye rolls, remember that every generation has their "Empire" on Earth, after all, so the fact that they're back with a different name isn't really that surprising).

This sounds worse than it is, to be fair.  The reinvention is lighter than some other franchises, and they don't skimp on humor and charm, particularly in letting us soak up all of the nostalgic glory of the franchise.  There's something so magical about hearing John Williams lush strings echoed behind the faces of Fisher, Hamill, and Ford (which are awash onscreen long enough for midnight movie crowds to cheer enthusiastically, and even if I didn't go to a premiere, I still heard the murmurs when Ford and Chewbacca or Leia's face first is shown on the movie screen).  To pretend otherwise would be stupid-Star Wars is so important to pop culture and these three have featured so prominently in it that we forgot the prequels entirely while waiting heroically for JJ Abrams to save the franchise, and he did.  This film, especially in the confines of a crowded movie theater, is extremely enjoyable to watch in the moment.  The action is intense, the set pieces are great, and the visual effects never totally abandon the color palette and become a CGI monstrosity (like, say, Jurassic World); the matte work seems to match in many ways what we first saw in a galaxy far, far away.  To put it bluntly, this is a good movie, and not one you're going to force yourself to watch when you prep for Episode VIII in two years.

The problem is that when it takes on A New Hope that I felt a little less enthused once I left the theater, and even as the film progressed it became a bit of an "oh, we're just going to do that again."  I liked the movie, don't get me wrong, and suggest you see it in theaters if you're one of the three people who haven't, but they're just not adding something new to the mix.  Ben Solo (Kylo Ren's real name) is just Anakin or Luke, continually having issues with his father or father figure, and watching Han Solo, one of the most iconic movie characters of all-time go down in a scene we're completely sure he's going to die in is so anti-climactic that it borders on sacrilege.  Is there really no way that we could have done Star Wars again without a son rebelling against his father?  Are there no other plot points in a galaxy far, far away?  The film is exhilarating, and the acting is good (though some people like Isaac and Ford are better than others), but the writing still needs work, and I hope that since I've already mentally spent money on the following two sequels (Disney bought the crack cocaine of movie franchises-no one quits this baby) my goal is that they not only continue to break down gender and racial stereotypes by casting against expectations (Poe could be gay, is all I'm saying here people), but also by defying expectations since we still have Luke and Leia to perhaps subvert the path that we followed in Empire and Jedi.

Those are my thoughts on the latest Star Wars.  I'm positive you've seen it, so why not share your own?  Do you agree with the death of such a beloved character?  Are you in the same boat as I where you were thrilled while watching but kind of wish you'd gotten something new instead of pleasant leftovers?  Share your thoughts below in the comments!

The Age of Adaline (2015)

Film: The Age of Adaline (2015)
Stars: Blake Lively, Michiel Huisman, Harrison Ford, Ellen Burstyn, Kathy Baker
Director: Lee Toland Krieger
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

I initially thought while going into The Age of Adaline that I had never actually seen Blake Lively act before.  This proved incorrect when I left the theater and double-checked on IMDB (I have seen The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, The Town, and The Green Lantern), so clearly she had not made much of an impression on me.  I was never drawn into Gossip Girl, her signature part, and really just knew her from her constant presence on the red carpet and celebrity marriage to Ryan Reynolds.  Not always a great place to be for an actress I'm about to review in what is her first leading role.

(Spoilers Ahead) But it's not the worst spot, as occasionally actresses surprise me, and not everything is bad in what looks like a potboiler-style film.  The movie is about Adaline Bowman (Lively), a woman who due to some freak accident with a car, some lightening, and some water (in science that even my Biology-befuddled-mind I knew sounded a bit silly), never ages.  She remains for the rest of her life the same youthful 29, eternally bound to being young and beautiful (I mean, if you're going to not age for the rest of your life there are worse places to be than Blake Lively), causing her to live a shadow-y non-existence, floating from one menial job to the other.  She seems happy enough, though always on auto-pilot, and still has a relationship with her daughter (the only person who knows her secret), who, by the time we hit the present day, has become Ellen Burstyn.

The film takes a turn when she falls in love with a handsome stranger named Ellis (Huisman, that hot guy from Game of Thrones, though really that doesn't corner things down much) and decides to take a brief turn into maybe having a real life, eventually meeting his parents, one of whom is a man she loved some forty years earlier named William (Ford).  The movie gets badly off-track from interesting melodrama to heavy-handed in the last thirty minutes with this relationship, with William discovering the secret and claiming that she needs to stay for Ellis, even though he seems to have become unhinged and is definitely wanting Adaline to stay for himself.  Actually, this borders from unhinged and into a bit demented-I'm not sure if Ford was trying something new here, but the entire performance that he was giving in the film was decidedly creepy and really made him look like a jerk; he's been married to Kathy Baker for forty years, and yet he still pines after this girl he randomly met in his youth?  It's disturbing, and the way that he imprints on his son his own feelings, trying to live vicariously-it's a bit sickening.  The film doesn't really have the parameters to go there (this is basically a Nicholas Sparks movie without the Nicholas Sparks), but this is something that I wish was either fully-explored or not discovered at all, because in this precarious situation I felt very uncomfortable for Adaline.

The film itself probably could have used a little bit more Adaline, which is odd since she's in almost every scene, but really the movie is all about her being passive, which doesn't really jive with the woman we meet in her 20's.  I would have loved to have seen a more ordinary look at how she ended up being this quiet, nonchalant woman, living a life of books and dogs and occasional visits from her daughter.  Maybe discover what her purpose has been the past forty years, because she seems so grounded, it's hard to imagine she didn't develop one after a while.  This would have helped give us some juxtaposition to the ending, which essentially sees her life only having a meaning when she gets a hot guy in it.  Lively's performance is occasionally quite masterful in this way-she knows how to have modulated fun in her role as Adaline, and unlike Ford, doesn't take melodrama as a reason to overact.  I would have liked to have seen a little bit more life in some of the lighter moments (the Trivial Pursuit scene seemed like a wasted opportunity), but overall this is the best I've seen Lively.  That's not necessarily a compliment (she's not giving greatness here), but it does have some promise and that's a start for an actress that, depending on the long-term success of this movie, could be around for a while longer at the cinema.

Those were my thoughts on this sudser, a film that feels very out-of-place in the cinemas of today, all wise and not willing to dream a bit, so I can't say I didn't like the movie, though I wouldn't recommend it at the same time (if you like 40's/50's melodramas, which generally I do, this is certainly for you).  What were your thoughts?  Has anyone seen The Age of Adaline?  Where do you weigh in?  Share your thoughts in the comments!

The Triple Crown of Cinematic Life Achievement

Yesterday the Hollywood Foreign Press Association announced that movie star and frequent Sexiest Man Alive George Clooney was chosen to be their recipient of the Cecil B. DeMille Award.  Clooney, a fixture at the Globes, will surely give a great, funny speech, probably with more than one joke about how, at only 53 and as one of the biggest stars on the planet, he's hardly ready to be getting a lifetime achievement award.

And quite frankly, I'm kind of with hypothetical Clooney on this one.  I know that trying to figure out what is going on in the heads of the HFPA is a fool's errand, but seriously?  George Clooney?  He's not even Jodie Foster where he's been acting in major films since he was a teenager and so there's decades of work to rely on, covering up the fact that she also was far too young.  You just know that Julia Roberts, Tom Cruise, and Brad Pitt are coming in the next couple of years at this rate, and even they have all had more important cinematic careers than Clooney's!  There are so many other names that should have been listed, and so in honor of these missing names, I figured it was high time that we check in on the Triple Crown of Cinematic Life Achievement.

The Triple Crown of Life Achievement, for those of you too lazy to go to the above link (just kidding-love you!), is my name for those rare entertainers that have won the Kennedy Center Honor, AFI Life Achievement Award and the Cecil B. DeMille Award (I skip the SAG Life Achievement Award because it is pretty evenly split with television actors and because it is more for services to the industry than straight-up life achievement, though it's also a big deal-congratulations age-appropriate Debbie Reynolds on winning this year!).  In the past year (since we last checked in on this topic), we've seen an odd amount of movement on the list.  In the great news column, we had our 21st performer (and fourth woman) hit the triple crown, the one-and-only Shirley MacLaine, who got the Kennedy Center Honor this past year.  We also saw Tom Hanks complete his second leg of the tour, getting the Kennedy Center Honor (just the DeMille, oddly enough, is left, despite him being relatively young and that being the first leg for most performers).  And most exciting of all, we saw Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda, Woody Allen, and yes, George Clooney, begin their journey toward the title.

On the other side, though, proving that there's a ticking clock for even the most accomplished of stars on completing the trio, we had four people pass away without completing the list: Lauren Bacall (missing AFI), Robin Williams (missing AFI/Kennedy), Shirley Temple Black (missing AFI/DeMille), and Ruby Dee (missing AFI/DeMille).  You have to assume that Williams in particular would have been able to complete at least one more award in the collection, maybe completing the circle.  Sadly, they all left us before we could finish honoring them.

Looking ahead, though, I want to take a peak at where we're at for the remaining contenders, starting with the eight people that are just one award away from completing the set.  Here we go!

Missing Only the DeMille: We'll start here since I'm royally peeved that George Clooney (who should have won in like fifteen years-I'm not a complete grump and wanting to deny him wholly) got what could have gone to a number of other, more age appropriate stars.  There are still four people that have somehow never won the DeMille (I'll put everyone's ages in parantheses): Tom Hanks (58), Meryl Streep (65), Mel Brooks (88), and Mike Nichols (82).  Of the four, I am certain that Meryl will win it at some point, even though Meryl has almost enough Golden Globe statues to make her own chess set with them (the DeMille could be the King!).  I am also confident that Hanks will win as soon as HFPA remembers they haven't given him a statue (I genuinely believe that they think they've already given him one-that's the only explanation for him winning after Clooney).  I am far more doubtful of both Brooks and Nichols, though Brooks especially is a huge miss for the Globes, considering he's been nominated four times and never won, and this would be a brilliant way to honor a comedic legend.

Missing Only the Kennedy Center: With Shirley MacLaine off of this list, we're now down to three men: Michael Douglas (69), Al Pacino (74), and Harrison Ford (72).  Last year I said MacLaine was the least likely to win of the four, and she was the first to do it, so this proves I know little, and so I'm going to second guess my thoughts from last year with Al Pacino are wrong, as he is slowly becoming less and less relevant and hasn't done what his peers like Robert Redford or Robert de Niro have done: staged an awards comeback.  However, Ford/Douglas/Pacino are incredibly famous movie stars and the Kennedy Center Honors has five recipients each year, including two typically for film, so this isn't particularly hard for them, but I think that Pacino is least likely to win this, with Douglas actually the most likely; he consistently makes movies and is extremely well-regarded in the industry (and for what it's worth, he's the youngest).  Ford doesn't have any Oscar-loving, which probably hurts him.  If he ever made a genuine play for another nomination, I think the accolades would come pouring in and he'd pull this off in the same way that Meryl did with The Iron Lady.

Missing Only the AFI Award: With the death of Lauren Bacall, we now only have one person who has won the DeMille and the Kennedy Center Honor but lost the AFI: Robert Redford (78).  Honestly, what's the hold-up here?  Redford's been a movie star for decades, is great behind-the-camera as well, continues to make important pictures like All is Lost and reinvented the independent cinema scene with Sundance.  Plus, he seems to be relatively well-liked.  I honestly don't get this-they need to jump on honoring him immediately (they haven't announced the 2015 winner-let's make it Redford).

Only has the Kennedy Center Honor: Here we run into a conundrum: the Kennedy Center Honors (and to a lesser extent, the DeMille Awards), honor not only for cinema but also television, theater, and the world of comedy.  As a result, we have people who are most noted for Broadway (James Earl Jones (83), Angela Lansbury (88)), stand-up (Lily Tomlin (75), Steve Martin (69)), and television (Oprah Winfrey (60)) who also have made significant contributions to cinema, though that may not be their primary claim to fame.  Because of this split in mediums, many of these people may stay in this first position indefinitely (though Martin could probably advance to at least the DeMille).  There's also Joanne Woodward (84), who won this award in conjunction with her husband Paul Newman (not to impugn Ms. Woodward, but that probably helped), as well as John Williams (82) who probably isn't famous enough with the mass public to win one of the other two awards.  Your best bet other than Martin to advance would surely be Julie Andrews (78), who would give a perfectly divine speech with the Globes if they let her, and is famous enough with the mass public to get them the ratings they're hoping to win.

Only has the DeMille: Considering that they generally go young with this award you have people like George Clooney (53) and Jodie Foster (51) who are infants in terms of these honors and have hopefully a couple of decades to inevitably win the next two trophies.  Time isn't necessarily the friend for reclusive stars like Doris Day (either 90 or 92, and don't you love that someone as famous as she can still hide her real age?), Gene Hackman (84), and Woody Allen (78), none of which would probably show up even if the Kennedy Center or AFI came a-knocking.  Anthony Hopkins (76) is getting up there in years and surprisingly hasn't parlayed his English sophistication into a Kennedy Center Honor, but considering he works constantly (we saw him earlier this year in Noah) he may just get there.  Finally, there's legendary Sophia Loren (79), whose lack of a Kennedy Center Honor is probably the strangest thing in this article after Tom Hanks missing the DeMille-surely the Kennedy Center Honors, which love to give trophies to artists from around the world, would like to honor the most famous Italian actress of all-time?

Only has the AFI Award: Tom Hanks moved on up from this classification, but in a bold move, we had a new name to this list (the AFI is the least likely of the three to go first): Jane Fonda (76) finally got some love for her many decades of filmmaking this past year with her win.  She's joined by George Lucas (70) as someone who has only won the AFI trophy, and while I suspect that Fonda will never get this entire circle (she's too controversial to get a government-issued award like the Kennedy Center Honor), she could still grab the DeMille and Lucas will surely get the Kennedy Center Honor before his career is over.

Hasn't Started Yet: I could list the likes of Roberts, Cruise, Bullock, Washington, and Pitt, but I'm going to stick with only people over the age of sixty (though Denzel actually hits that number in December so maybe it's about time to add him to the roster?).  Some names off the top of my head (there are surely more-share them in the comments): Diane Keaton (68), Samuel L. Jackson (65), Julie Christie (73/74-another mystery!), Glenn Close (67), Robert Duvall (83), Cher (68), Jeff Bridges (64), Maggie Smith (79), Faye Dunaway (73), Michael Caine (81), Judi Dench (79), Ellen Burstyn (81), Christopher Plummer (84), Bette Midler (68), Jessica Lange (65), Helen Mirren (69), Francis Ford Coppola (75), Catherine Deneuve (70), Sissy Spacek (64), Kathy Bates (66), Vanessa Redgrave (77), Arnold Schwarzenegger (67), Goldie Hawn (68), Norman Jewison (88), Rita Morena (82), Milos Forman (82), and Liza Minnelli (68).  And there are surely others...which again is why it is so sad that George Clooney, young, spritely, decades-left-of-his-career George Clooney was chosen this year.

But seriously, congratulations.

Living Cast Members of Classic Films, Part 3

A little under two months ago we did two of the more popular posts of the year (check them out here and here) on the blog, and I’ve been itching to add another installment to the series, so I figured why not today?  The pieces chronicled the Top 100 AFI movies of the Institute’s list of the greatest American films.  However, the AFI updated their list in 2007 with 23 new films that were moved into the category of the “best.”  Since we haven’t parceled through these 23 movies, I figured now is the time (for the complete updated list click here).  Let’s dive in (and as a reminder-for the purposes of this article we’ll limit to speaking roles in the film, though this isn’t an exact science and if you have any corrections, share them in the comments!)

Buster Keaton and Marion Mack in The General

18. The General (1927)

Already we have to cheat a bit (silent movie and all), but as this film is from 1927 and as we chronicled before that very few actors from the Silent Era are still alive, it’s safe to say no person who appeared in The General is still with us.  The longest-living person in the film appears to be star Marion Mack, who played Annabelle Lee, who died at the age of 87 in 1989.  She quit acting in the 1940’s and eventually became a real estate broker before being discovered by a film historian, and then went to screenings of The General to help promote it into the classic it is considered today.

49. Intolerance (1916)

In a cast of thousands, it’s hard to believe that the main actress in the film, Lillian Gish (forever rocking her cradle) would be the longest-lived, but that seems to be the case of actors I could find online.  Gish was only 23 when the film was made and lived to be almost 100 years old (dying just a few months shy of her centennial in 1993).  She would be Griffith’s greatest muse and receive an Honorary Oscar in 1971 for her contributions to the cinema.

50. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)

Not only is every major cast member of the film still alive, but some of them (Ian McKellen, Andy Serkis, Christopher Lee, Orlando Bloom), came back to their roles to star in the final three installments in the series, The Hobbit movies.

Keith Carradine

59. Nashville (1975)

While a few cast members of the film have since passed, a number more are still with us, including Lily Tomlin (74), Geraldine Chaplin (69), Ronee Blakley (68), and Keith Carradine (64), who won an Oscar for his work in the film.

61. Sullivan’s Travels (1942)

From what I can find (hints in the comments if you’ve got them), the last living member of this cast with a speaking role may well have been leading actor Joel McCrea, who died in 1990 at the age of 84.  Veronica Lake was considerably younger than McCrea, of course, but died tragically in 1973 from hepatitis.

63. Cabaret (1972)

Here we have better luck, with the bulk of the cast of the film, including Liza Minnelli (68), Michael York (72), Joel Grey (82), Fritz Wepper (72), and Marisa Berenson (67) all still with us.  Both Minnelli and Grey won Oscars for their work in this film, and oddly enough this movie largely clobbered The Godfather in 1972 with AMPAS, despite the latter taking the Best Picture Oscar.

George Segal in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

67. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)

With a cast of only four actors, that puts a lot of pressure on at least one of them to still be with us.  Sadly only one still is.  George Segal turned eighty this past year, and though he is more well-known to modern audiences for his work in Just Shoot Me and The Goldbergs, he was once a regular in cinematic roles.  This film won him his only Oscar nomination.

71. Saving Private Ryan (1998)

One of the few films listed here that were released after the initial AFI list, this film of course has a great number of living actors, including leading man Tom Hanks, as well as supporting players Ed Burns, Matt Damon, Tom Sizemore, and Lost’s own Jeremy Davies.

72. The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

One of those rare films that has grown in huge adoration through the years (it barely broke even when it was first released), Shawshank’s extremely recent release date ensures that most of the cast is still alive, including leading actors Morgan Freeman (77) and Tim Robbins (55).

75. In the Heat of the Night (1967)

Though Rod Steiger died over a decade ago (it doesn’t seem that long-time flies), there are still a few cast members alive from this film including Harry Dean Stanton (88…and wouldn’t you just love for Quentin Tarantino to get him an Oscar nomination?), Lee Grant (87), and Mr. Tibbs himself, Sir Sidney Poitier (87).

Jane Alexander in All the President's Men

77. All the President’s Men (1976)

Both Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) and Woodward (Robert Redford) are still alive, as is Deep Throat himself (Hal Holbrook, who turned 89 this past year).  Though Jason Robards, who won an Oscar for his work in this film, has passed, Jane Alexander (who was Oscar-nominated for her work) is also still alive at the age of 74.

81. Spartacus (1960)

Michael Scott’s classic whodunit, the real Spartacus is thankfully still with us at 97, Mr. Kirk Douglas.  A few other sparing cast members are also with us, including 79-year-old Joanna Barnes (as Claudia Marius) and 83-year-old John Gavin (Julius Caesar).  Gavin would also appear in another monumental classic that year in Psycho (he played Marion Crane’s boyfriend Sam) and would later in his career pull a Shirley Temple, serving as Ambassador to Mexico during the Reagan administration.

82. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927)

First, can I just vouch that if you haven’t seen this incredible movie that you simply must-it’s sensational!  Oddly enough, the longest-living cast members died just a few short months apart and played rivals for one man’s affections in the film.  Janet Gaynor (the Wife) died in September of 1984 at the age of 77, just a few months before Margaret Livingston (the Woman from the City) died at the age of 89.

83. Titanic (1997)

One of the newest films on this list, almost every major actor in the film (save Gloria Stuart) is still alive including Leonardo DiCaprio (39), Kate Winslet (38), Billy Zane (48), Kathy Bates (66), and Mrs. James Cameron herself, Suzy Amis (52).

85. A Night at the Opera (1935)

Long after all of the Marx Brothers were pushing up daisies, one of the most notable television personalities of the 1950’s was still with us.  Kitty Carlisle died at the age of 96 in 2007, over seventy years after she played Rosa Castaldi.

Jack Klugman in 12 Angry Men

87. 12 Angry Men (1957)

With the death of Jack Klugman in 2012 (he played Juror #5, who was a big baseball fan in the film but was a pretty small part all things considered), no speaking cast member of this film is still alive.  Klugman was most noted for his work as Oscar Madison on the television show The Odd Couple, for which he won two Emmy Awards, though I most fondly think of him as a frequent cast member of The Twilight Zone.

89. The Sixth Sense (1999)

You’re right to raise your eyebrow on this film making the Top 100 greatest movies of all time, but I’m not here to judge, just to record and verify.  Obviously most of these cast members are still alive including Bruce Willis (59), Haley Joel Osment (26), Toni Collette (41), Olivia Williams (45), and a young Mischa Barton (28).  Both Osment and Collette earned their only Oscar nominations to date for this film.

90. Swing Time (1936)

Ginger Rogers ended up being the longest-living cast member of Swing Time, outliving Fred by eight years and passing away in 1995 at the age of 83.

91. Sophie’s Choice (1982)

My other eyebrow is raised now, but thankfully most of this film’s talented cast is still with us, including the main trio of Meryl Streep (65), Kevin Kline (66), and Peter MacNicol (60).  You already know this, but Meryl Streep won her second Oscar and first for Best Actress for this film.

Cybill Shepherd in The Last Picture Show

95. The Last Picture Show (1971)

Cast with a host of young actors at the time, this was bound to have a number of living cast members, and though most are well into their 60’s and beyond, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t indeed a lot of them.  Amongst them are Jeff Bridges (64), Cloris Leachman (88), Timothy Bottoms (62), Cybill Shepherd (64-who was a very big deal in the movies in the 1970’s for those who only know her from Family Guy jokes), Ellen Burstyn (81), and Randy Quaid (63).  Bridges, Leachman, and Burstyn all received Oscar nominations for their work and Leachman won the trophy.

96. Do the Right Thing (1989)

Thankfully there’s a big cast here, as a few of these cast members have passed away in the last few years.  Amongst the living cast members are Spike Lee (57), Danny Aiello (81-who won an Oscar nomination for this role that was originally going to go to Robert de Niro), Giancarlo Esposito (56, and who is wonderful in this film), John Turturro (57), Martin Lawrence (49), and Rosie Perez (also 49).  For those of you out there who wonder why Spike Lee is still spoken about in such reverential tones, this is a good place to start finding the answer.

97. Blade Runner (1982)

Ridley Scott’s masterwork is one of those rare classic films that I’ve never seen (it’s toward the top of my Netflix queue for the curious), and has most of its principle cast members still alive including Harrison Ford (72), Rutger Hauer (70), Edward James Olmos (67), and Sean Young (54-does anyone else always think of Drive Me Crazy when they hear about her?).

99. Toy Story (1995)

I heart this movie so much, and anyone who is aware of the sequels knows this cast is almost entirely intact from Tom Hanks (58) and Tim Allen (61) in the lead roles to key supporting players voiced by Don Rickles (88), Wallace Shawn (70), John Ratzenberger (67), Annie Potts (61), and Laurie Metcalf (59).

And there you have it-the living stars of classic AFI films.  We’ve chronicled all of the AFI 100 films now, as well as Silent Era stars-let me know what else you think I should investigate.