Not nearly as dated as one might expect, Air Force One (released in 1997) is probably the last really good action movie starring Harrison Ford. Seriously, K-19: The Widowmaker and Hollywood Homicide were plain crap and last month’s Firewall doesn’t look to be much better; maybe if Indiana Jones 4 ever does get made he’ll get one last great actioner but otherwise, already being 63 years old this could be it.

AF1 has Ford playing the President of the United States, a former Marine who earned the Medal of Honor (presumably in Vietnam), and opens with the capture of radical Russian nationalist General Radek (Jurgen Prochnow in what was probably a bigger role before the final edit) by a joint combat team and then, three weeks later, a short speech by Ford at a banquet in Moscow celebrating it. In his speech, President Marshall announces a new American policy: politicial expediency will no longer be a reason for the US and its allies not to act to bring down dictatorships and terrorist leaders.

After dinner the First Family and entourage board Air Force One for the flight home. Also on the plane are a team of Radek’s followers in the guise of a Russian TV crew lead by Gary Oldman, an actor who can be evil in any nationality (I wonder if any director has the cojones to use makeup so he can play an evil African). They’re able to take control of the plane through the treachery of the lead Secret Service agent, played by 24’s Xander Berkeley which contrasts with the much more positive portrayal the service got four years earlier in the director Wolfgang Peterson’s In the Line of Fire.

Of course this is a big Hollywood blockbuster and there can be no doubt of the outcome, only which of the secondary characters (e.g., William H. Macy, the cute deputy press secretary and CSI’s Paul Guilfoyle) will die and in what order. Back at the ranch, Vice President Glenn Close and SecDef Dean Stockwell do a little headbutting over who’s in charge–I guess the Haig and the Reagan years were still fresh when Andrew Marlowe wrote the script–but essentially serve as a way to move the plot a long without much personality.
Peterson is probably due the most credit for making this movie so watchable. Either that or his long string of really good movies is a very big coincidence (Das Boot, Outbreak, Troy, The Perfect Storm). Peterson has a knack for pacing and for using just big enough gulps of action which here is typified by the way one American fighter plane turns belly up to take a Russian MiG’s missile in front of the President’s plane. Marlowe gives us some fairly good–but not great–dialog, credit due and given.

recommended

Incredible movies can be made about the strength some individuals find within themselves in the face of terrible things men do to other men. Life is Beautiful, where an Italian man is caught up in Hitler’s Holocaust, and The Killing Fields, about Pol Pot’s ethnic cleansing in Cambodia, are two which come easily to mind. Hotel Rwanda is easily worthy of joining this company. That Don Cheadle and Terry George did not win Oscars two years ago–Cheadle lost Best Actor to Jamie Foxx’s Ray Charles and George lost Best Original Screenplay to Charlie Kaufman, Michel Gondry and Pierre Bismuth for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind--is something I don’t understand.

Cheadle portrays Paul Rusesabagina, local manager of a swank hotel owned by Belgian airline Sabena in the capital of Rwanda and a Hutu married to a Tutsi woman, as fighting between the Hutu and the Tutsi for control of the African nation comes to a head. The movie opens the night before everything comes crashing down, as Hutu militia rebel against their own President; they assassinate him after he signs a cease fire pact and claim it was Tutsi rebels. This is justification enough to begin a horrific massacre in which the death toll quickly runs to a million or more Tutsi men, women and children.

Cheadle is reasonably well connected and intelligent. He’s been paying off one of the key Hutu generals (played by Fana Mokoena, who reminds me of Yaphet Kotto) and is able to leverage that relationship, with some fast thinking, to keep his hotel a sanctuary for over a thousand people who would have otherwise surely been among the bodies littering lawns and roads. Nick Nolte has a good supporting bit as an American colonel running the UN Peacekeeping force in Rwanda, frustrated by protocol which makes him unable to do much more than stand in between militiamen and potential victims.

Hotel Rwanda also reminds me of City of God in that both are stories of incredible sadness about people who are unfortunate enough to live in places which Americans and other Westerners simply don’t connect to or care about. Neither Rwanda nor the slums of Brazil have any resources we find useful, no terrorist groups have emerged from them, and therefore they don’t register on our radar. Bob Herbert has been attempting to raise consciousness on similar tragedy going on right now in Darfur, Sudan, but despite having the bully pulpit of several columns a week on the OpEd page of The New York Times I don’t believe he’s saved one life after writing columns for more than two years.

definitely recommended

Though it kind of sank without a trace on release in 1983, Eddie and the Cruisers has always been a favorite of mine. How could it not be? After all, the main character is a fusion of Bruce Springsteen and Jim Morrison, the music is John Cafferty’s closest Springsteen imitation ever and his band Beaver Brown does their best E Street too, and then there’s the whole Jersey cool aspect. A whole bunch of people picked up on the movie when it hit cable (Showtime originally, I think) and then video, but that just got us a crap sequel.

Basics: It’s 1983 and something strange is going on with people who used to be in a flash in the pan called Eddie and the Crusiers, there’s a surge of interest driven by rumors that never died of a mysterious second album made before Eddie died in a car crash. Flash back to 1963 or so, just before the Beatles tidal wave, and Eddie Wilson has broken his band the Cruisers big, after years of slogging in bars and colleges from the Jersey Shore to Ohio. We even get flashbacks on the flashback, to see the band as it came together.

There’s no doubt this is a trashy film, though probably better than the PF Kluge novel on which its based, but the story and the music are so cool I don’t care. Michael Pare is good enough as Eddie and Tom Berenger is just young enough to play the poet/piano player and his twenty years older high school English teacher counterpart but I imagine I was hardly alone in feeling the heat steaming off Helen Schneider as Eddie’s girl Joann. She was just so sweet to Berenger’s way out of his depth youngster and to this day I wonder why she didn’t ever show up again in Hollywood product. Joe Pantoliano had one of his first prominent roles, this was right around the same time as his pimp performance in Risky Business, as the band’s slick manager and you know he must have been good because all these years later I still think of him as sleazy.

Obviously recommended