Category: 2015

Reel 83: In the Style of Howard Hawks

Our first episode of 2025 is the last of our “In the Style of” series, and this was a fun one to make for us. This time around we’re looking at films that emulate director Howard Hawks in one way or another. Maybe it’s dialogue, maybe it’s the overall vibe, maybe it’s the cinematography…

…Nah. It’s not the cinematography. But it is the vibe and the dialogue. Both of these films, which couldn’t be more different in content and tone from one another (or from most of Hawks’ work, for that matter), definitely have an echo that could get you thinking, “Yeah…he would have handled this pretty much the same way.”

On to fhe movies themselves. And we open up with 1994’s The Bus That Couldn’t Slow Down Speed, directed by Jan de Bont in his American feature debut as a director, and starring Keanu Reeves and a then largely-unknown Sandra Bullock. It’s a tense thriller that still manages to overlay a lot of laugh-out-loud  humor, and a little bit of romantic comedy. Dennis Hopper plays a pretty definitive crazy guy as only he can, and we get some smaller-but-solid performances from the likes of Jeff Daniels, Joe Morton and Alan Ruck.

From there we jump ahead to 2015 and The Martian, directed by Ridley Scott and starring Matt Damon for half the movie, and Jessica Chastain, Kristen Wiig, Jeff Daniels (again), and a lot of other solid talent holding up the other half. Matt Damon is stranded on Mars and needs to stay alive for much longer than his equipment was designed to do. And all the folks on Earth have to find a way to get to Mars much faster than they expected they’d ever need. Again, a taut, serious story with a humorous overlay that’s quite faithful to its source material. Is the story good science? …eh…mostly. There are a few spots where Andy Weir, the book’s author, concedes he had to break the rules to get some characters where they needed to be. But in the long run you don’t care because it’s a fun ride.


COMING ATTRACTIONS:

If you like Denzel Washington, you’re going to love the next episode. Denzel is on the case, as we screen The Mighty Quinn, which wasn’t his first film role but it was his first after St. Elsewhere (I think…I’m pretty sure), and then it’s Inside Man, a heist film with an ending that we think will surprise you.

Reel 8: SorkinFest Part III–Mostly-True Stories

That’s a little bit of a misnomer, but not by much.

This episode–the third in our series of five episodes dedicated to Aaron Sorkin’s work–looks at two films he worked on that told stories about specific individuals: Steve Jobs (2015), Directed by Danny Boyle, and Sorkin’s film directing debut, 2017’s Molly’s Game.

Now, with Steve Jobs, Sorkin took some of the storylines provided by Walter Isaacson’s biography, and placed them into specific contexts, with the upshot being that many of the real-life counterparts found themselves saying “…yeah, that’s not quite how it went,” but you can blame that on Isaacson, not Sorkin. Molly’s Game, on the other hand, is based on the story as told by Molly Bloom in her book, so if there are inaccuracies, then it’s either Bloom herself as the unreliable narrator, or Sorkin taking a little artistic license, or maybe it’s a little of Column A and a little of Column B.

Either way, what we have here is a pair of films that both work well with Sorkin’s dialogue and aren’t especially heavy-handed with some of the allusions they make.

COMING ATTRACTIONS: In the next episode we step back a little bit and look at two films for which Sorkin has a credit for doing re-writes. Tune in for our look at Malice and Moneyball.