A Few More Movies

Brief comments on a few movies we’ve watched lately:

AUGUST RUSH – I didn’t know what to expect from this movie, didn’t recall reading anything about it when it came out. It’s the story of a kid from a New York children’s home who runs away to find his real parents. He’s a musical prodigy and believe he can communicate with his mother and father through his music and summon them to him. Interspersed are flashbacks to the ill-fated romance between the parents. You won’t find many movies with more cornball, far-fetched coincidences than this one . . . but somehow it works and I got caught up in it in spite of myself. The music is really good, too. Not a great film, but a good little one, and I liked it.

THE MAN WITH ONE RED SHOE – I had seen this early Tom Hanks movie, but so long ago that it might as well have been new because I didn’t remember any of it. Hanks plays a somewhat goofy concert violinist who, through no fault of his own, gets caught up in a dangerous war between two factions struggling for control of the CIA. At the same time, there’s a sex farce angle (this is based on a French film, after all) involving a couple of Hanks’s fellow musicians played by Carrie Fisher and Jim Belushi. Dabney Coleman is the villain. (Is Dabney Coleman still alive? It seemed like he was in every other movie during the Eighties.) Lori Singer is a CIA agent who falls for Hanks. In this movie, at least, she bears a strong resemblance to Donna Dixon, who played Hanks’s girlfriend Sunny on the TV show BOSOM BUDDIES. (“Sunny, Sunny, Sunny . . .”) Again, not a great film, but I laughed quite a bit and enjoyed it, even though I also spent a considerable amount of time thinking, “Boy, look how young they all are!”

THE JACKAL – We never watched this one when it first came out a little over a decade ago. It’s a very loose remake of THE DAY OF THE JACKAL, but it doesn’t share much with the earlier film except the basic premise of a supposedly unstoppable assassin who’s planning to kill a very high-profile target. The plot this time around involves a Russian mobster seeking revenge on the FBI and the Russian M.V.D. police agency for the death of his brother, who was killed in a joint American/Russian crackdown on crime in Moscow. Bruce Willis plays the Jackal, the mysterious assassin hired by the Russian to carry out a brutal, very public hit in the United States. Sidney Poitier is the FBI agent heading up the team trying to stop him, which includes an I.R.A. terrorist (Richard Gere) freed from prison to help because he can give them a lead to the Jackal. Jack Black, of all people, shows up as a goofy (what else?) weapons designer. It’s all pretty much by the numbers and took me a while to warm up to it, but I wound up liking the movie fairly well. There’s one unintentional laugh late in the film during a tense shootout when somebody who’s probably a member of the crew strolls by in the background of a shot, obviously not supposed to be there. I’m surprised nobody caught that in the editing. Worth watching if you haven’t seen it, but don’t run out to look for a copy.

BOUNCE – I’m not sure what genre this movie falls into. There are a few laughs, but mostly it’s a tragic romance about a guy who trades boarding passes with someone he meets at the airport so he can stay over in Chicago one more night with a beautiful blonde he also met at the airport. Of course the plane crashes, of course the guy who wasn’t supposed to be on it is killed, and of course the guy who was supposed to be on it feels guilty, goes to see the dead guy’s widow, and falls in love with her. But he doesn’t tell her who he really is and what his real connection to her is, so complications ensue. Not really my kind of movie, and to be honest I dozed through part of it, but I saw most of it and it didn’t strike me as terrible. But films like this rarely resonate with me, and this one didn’t.

As you can probably guess, lately we’ve been watching movies that we picked up cheaply. There are a lot of things we never saw over the years, or saw so long ago that we don’t really remember them, and some of them have turned out to be pretty good.