Year: 1999

‘Ever since I was a kid I wanted to be a paramedic.’ If you’re expecting director Martin Scorsese to give the GoodFellas treatment to ambulance jockeys in Bringing Out the Dead, you’ll be disappointed. Instead of a my-world-and-welcome-to-it approach, Scorsese offers us a dizzying stream-of-consciousness meditation on death and dying via an EMS tech who calls himself a ‘grief mop.’

It’s always a bit of a thrill to discover a gem of a film at the video store — it’s like finding buried treasure. Monument Avenue, a slow-burn drama, is exactly the kind of small, character-driven movie that gets ignored at the box office. Fortunately, these movies also play well on video, which allows them to finally get the audience they deserve.

Is there a manlier man than Harrison Ford in Hollywood today? I doubt it. Onscreen, he plays cops and adventurers; offscreen he practices carpentry on his ranch in Big Sky country. He’s the Marlboro Man without lung cancer. He’s the perfect object of where-have-all-the-cowboys-gone? lust. Which makes him the perfect leading man for a piece of relationship porn like Random Hearts.

Personally, I’da thought Death himself would be more interesting than a doe-eyed Brad Pitt doing his best Forrest Gump imitation. I mean, he’s got a pretty cool job that takes him all over the world. He meets people from literally all walks of life. He’s been around, you know? But director Martin Brest and his four (count ’em) screenwriters would have us believe that Death is so busy with his grim reaping that he hasn’t had time to develop any semblance of a personality.

Whaddaya know? I went to a hockey movie, and a story broke out. Yeah, Mystery, Alaska is a rather standard piece of David E. Kelley calculated quirkiness (Kelley cowrote with Sean O’Byrne), but except for one detour into melodrama and a one-liner that is appallingly awful in every possible way, this gently funny and surprisingly touching film manages to transcend its many cliches.

There’s something just a wee bit creepy about Happy, Texas. If it were just about a pair of escaped convicts forced to pretend to be a gay couple, or just about escaped convicts tutoring little girls, or just about little girls on display for the pleasure of grown-ups, maybe I could deal. Or if it stayed all these things but were more bizarro than it is, maybe I could deal. But Happy, Texas wraps all its concepts up in a package that’s undistorted and unironic enough that it just doesn’t sit right with me.

Russell is not complacent with making the audience laugh at the oddities of war. Like an emotional roller coaster ride, Three Kings offers a disturbing moment for every humorous one. Desperate Iraqi women beg for food for their babies. Figures in elephantine gas-masks move through a gas-shrouded minefield — an intensely frightening alien world we never saw on CNN.

A bit of Titanic counterprogramming debuts today in the form of two new videos from Bennu Multimedia: a digitally remastered version of an early movie account of that famous meeting with the iceberg, and a companion documentary that looks at the aftermath of the disaster. Both videos are hosted by David McCallum, who appeared in the previously definitive Titanic film, A Night to Remember.