Always by Steven Spielberg
There's no way this remake of A Guy Named Joe (the original a World War Two drama with Spencer Tracy) could be mistaken as having been directed by anyone other than Steven Spielberg. Always (1989), feeling like a 1940s melodrama on purpose, but sprinkled also with Spielberg's habits, is about a cocky, annoying pilot of B-26 bombers modified to fly over forest fires, helping put them out--all on a scale well-contained and not even remotely as vast as the fires afflicting the western states in these latter years.
The lack of attention paid to the issue of forest fires is equal to the fires being just a backdrop, a reason for getting Pete Sandich (Richard Dreyfuss) into trouble, into death after using his red fire retardant to put out Al Yackey's (John Goodman) burning engine. Pete's plane catches fire, he blows up in the sky, everyone is shocked, especially, for months, Pete's girlfriend, Dorinda Durston (Holly Hunter). She's mainly a ground control operator, but also flies missions sometimes. As she recovers, Ted Baker (Brad Johnson), a tall and handsome basic man (like a 1940s cardboard character), acting on love at first sight, begins to make tentative moves in her direction, gradually encouraged by Pete's ghost.
We've seen this kind of thing before. I was reminded of It's a Wonderful Life, but in the end credits it says the film is based on the Dalton Trumbo screenplay for A Guy Named Joe, which I haven't seen but I know about it. A dead flier, reluctant at first, comes around to encouraging (through a dead to the living mind telepathy, I guess) a living flier in his love choice, the woman the dead flier loved in life and still loves.
The wrinkle comes in the form of the film's best scenes, those featuring Hap (Audrey Hepburn in her final film). A supernatural post-life angel on my shoulder-type, Hap offers advice, suggesting to Pete he must learn to let go, that he's hanging on to his love for Dorinda, that the clinging isn't helping her and he must move on to another level--you know, that kind of thing familiar to anyone who's seen Touched By an Angel, Ghost Whisperer, or numerous movies about love, heartbreak and/or death.
These scenes are excellent because of Audrey Hepburn, a great actress--it's as simple as that.
What isn't great about this movie is the usual overdose of Spielbergian corn. His little nods to World War Two, as when Al Yackey makes a verbal comparison to dropping bombs every time he unleashes a fire-suppressing load, an act that's the opposite of the violent destruction he mutters about on his missions. I get the impression he would've loved bombing European or Japanese cities. Spielberg fetishizes the B-26 bomber, a very handsomely designed airplane. A representative shot of Pete's B-26 shows it silhouetted by blue light. The shot reminded me of Spielberg's B-17 bombing episode of his 1980s TV show Amazing Stories, in which a ball turret gunner gets stuck inside his turret, the landing gear mechanism damaged, necessitating his crushing demise when the plane lands back in England.
Everything spectacular about Spielberg's work, the schmaltzy, the incredible, the simply unlikely, with people not acting like actual human beings, followed up by a deus ex machina involving cartoon balloon tires suddenly appearing underneath the B-17, saving the life of the ball turret gunner, appears in this episode. Throughout his career in motion pictures, with well-crafted, mechanically sound executions, his technique the justifiable envy of many younger directors (like J.J. Abrams and Michael Bay), Spielberg nevertheless sometimes destroys his premises with weird childlike beliefs in the powers of the imagination--in Always, the thrust is more convincing than in the Amazing Stories episode, but there's an annoyingly similar failure in both to match believable reality with the productions of Spielberg's brain.
If you buy into the worst of Spielberg's horseshit, you're fine with what he does. For me, that kind of maudlin storytelling doesn't work. I can buy into a fantastic scenario, like Hellraiser, with the bizarre villain Pinhead saying lines like, "We have all eternity to taste your flesh!" Hellraiser is convincing within its own logic, as is Psycho, as is Tolkien's novel, The Hobbit.
Always, like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, features an irresponsible man (a Baby Boomer like Spielberg) struggling to get his way. Dorinda, too, is willful, as she takes away a firefighting mission from a more experienced colleague, thus endangering the lives of six trapped firefighters. This contrivance gives Spielberg the chance to put Pete in the B-26 with Dorinda, offering encouragement and advice on fighting the fire, on landing the damaged plane in the lake. She suffers no impact injuries, gets taken by the hand by Pete to the surface, walks miles back in soaked clothing to the airfield (this is high altitude Idaho), does not suffer hypothermia, puts her arms around the big simple Ted. Pete recedes into eternity, I guess, taking a last look at his beloved, knowing happily that she'll get over him in the embrace of a man he once regarded as his rival.
It's so fucking heartwarming.
Vic Neptune
There's no way this remake of A Guy Named Joe (the original a World War Two drama with Spencer Tracy) could be mistaken as having been directed by anyone other than Steven Spielberg. Always (1989), feeling like a 1940s melodrama on purpose, but sprinkled also with Spielberg's habits, is about a cocky, annoying pilot of B-26 bombers modified to fly over forest fires, helping put them out--all on a scale well-contained and not even remotely as vast as the fires afflicting the western states in these latter years.
The lack of attention paid to the issue of forest fires is equal to the fires being just a backdrop, a reason for getting Pete Sandich (Richard Dreyfuss) into trouble, into death after using his red fire retardant to put out Al Yackey's (John Goodman) burning engine. Pete's plane catches fire, he blows up in the sky, everyone is shocked, especially, for months, Pete's girlfriend, Dorinda Durston (Holly Hunter). She's mainly a ground control operator, but also flies missions sometimes. As she recovers, Ted Baker (Brad Johnson), a tall and handsome basic man (like a 1940s cardboard character), acting on love at first sight, begins to make tentative moves in her direction, gradually encouraged by Pete's ghost.
We've seen this kind of thing before. I was reminded of It's a Wonderful Life, but in the end credits it says the film is based on the Dalton Trumbo screenplay for A Guy Named Joe, which I haven't seen but I know about it. A dead flier, reluctant at first, comes around to encouraging (through a dead to the living mind telepathy, I guess) a living flier in his love choice, the woman the dead flier loved in life and still loves.
The wrinkle comes in the form of the film's best scenes, those featuring Hap (Audrey Hepburn in her final film). A supernatural post-life angel on my shoulder-type, Hap offers advice, suggesting to Pete he must learn to let go, that he's hanging on to his love for Dorinda, that the clinging isn't helping her and he must move on to another level--you know, that kind of thing familiar to anyone who's seen Touched By an Angel, Ghost Whisperer, or numerous movies about love, heartbreak and/or death.
These scenes are excellent because of Audrey Hepburn, a great actress--it's as simple as that.
What isn't great about this movie is the usual overdose of Spielbergian corn. His little nods to World War Two, as when Al Yackey makes a verbal comparison to dropping bombs every time he unleashes a fire-suppressing load, an act that's the opposite of the violent destruction he mutters about on his missions. I get the impression he would've loved bombing European or Japanese cities. Spielberg fetishizes the B-26 bomber, a very handsomely designed airplane. A representative shot of Pete's B-26 shows it silhouetted by blue light. The shot reminded me of Spielberg's B-17 bombing episode of his 1980s TV show Amazing Stories, in which a ball turret gunner gets stuck inside his turret, the landing gear mechanism damaged, necessitating his crushing demise when the plane lands back in England.
Everything spectacular about Spielberg's work, the schmaltzy, the incredible, the simply unlikely, with people not acting like actual human beings, followed up by a deus ex machina involving cartoon balloon tires suddenly appearing underneath the B-17, saving the life of the ball turret gunner, appears in this episode. Throughout his career in motion pictures, with well-crafted, mechanically sound executions, his technique the justifiable envy of many younger directors (like J.J. Abrams and Michael Bay), Spielberg nevertheless sometimes destroys his premises with weird childlike beliefs in the powers of the imagination--in Always, the thrust is more convincing than in the Amazing Stories episode, but there's an annoyingly similar failure in both to match believable reality with the productions of Spielberg's brain.
If you buy into the worst of Spielberg's horseshit, you're fine with what he does. For me, that kind of maudlin storytelling doesn't work. I can buy into a fantastic scenario, like Hellraiser, with the bizarre villain Pinhead saying lines like, "We have all eternity to taste your flesh!" Hellraiser is convincing within its own logic, as is Psycho, as is Tolkien's novel, The Hobbit.
Always, like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, features an irresponsible man (a Baby Boomer like Spielberg) struggling to get his way. Dorinda, too, is willful, as she takes away a firefighting mission from a more experienced colleague, thus endangering the lives of six trapped firefighters. This contrivance gives Spielberg the chance to put Pete in the B-26 with Dorinda, offering encouragement and advice on fighting the fire, on landing the damaged plane in the lake. She suffers no impact injuries, gets taken by the hand by Pete to the surface, walks miles back in soaked clothing to the airfield (this is high altitude Idaho), does not suffer hypothermia, puts her arms around the big simple Ted. Pete recedes into eternity, I guess, taking a last look at his beloved, knowing happily that she'll get over him in the embrace of a man he once regarded as his rival.
It's so fucking heartwarming.
Vic Neptune
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