How many westerns do you know that open with a graduation ceremony at Harvard? I can only think of Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate.
Today’s scene that I love comes from the controversial 1981 epic western. Some people feel that Heaven’s Gate is a secret masterpiece. I’m not quite one of those people but I do think the Harvard graduation scene was a great way to launch Cimino’s idiosyncratic vision of the Old West.
4 Shots From 4 Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films lets the visuals do the talking!
Today, it is time to celebrate the birth of one of the most intriguing (if uneven) filmmakers of the 20th Century, Michael Cimino! It’s time for….
4 Shots From 4 Michael Cimino Films
Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974, directed by Michael Cimino, DP: Frank Stanley)
The Deer Hunter (1978, dir by Michael Cimino. DP: Vilmos Zsigmond)
Heaven’s Gate (1980, dir by Michael Cimino, DP: Vilmos Zsigmond)
The Year of the Dragon (1985, dir by Michael Cimino, DP: Alex Thomson)
What a romantic song. Of course, this was originally heard in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. It turned out that James Bond and Tracy didn’t have all the time in the world.
Enjoy!
Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Mondays, I will be reviewing CHiPs, which ran on NBC from 1977 to 1983. The entire show is currently streaming on Prime!
Who will be Jon’s partner this week? Read on to find out!
Episode 5.7 “Bomb Run”
(Dir by Phil Bondelli, originally aired on November 15th, 1981)
I was really hoping that this would be another episode with Caitlyn Jenner playing Steve but no, Ponch was back. (Erik Estrada is the better actor of the two but Jenner’s performance is often so bizarre in its utter blandness that it becomes fascinating to watch.) This episode opened with Baker observing as Ponch piloted a small airplane. CHiPs was all about the California lifestyle and apparently, a big part of that lifestyle was being able to take off in a small private plane whenever you felt like it. Ponch thinks that he’s ready for a solo flight but Baker tells him that he still needs to work on his landing skills. Sorry, Ponch, you’re not a Kennedy.
The highway patrol is preparing for the big air show. Officer Baricza (Brodie Greer) is surprised when he sees his ex-girlfriend, Terri (Kristin Griffith), hanging out around an airplane and preparing to take part in the show despite the fact that she has always been scared of flying. What Baricza does not know is that Terri and her father (Ed King) have planned a big robbery to take place during the air show. While Terri drops bombs from the airplane, the explosions will cover the sound of two safecrackers (played by Brion James and Taylor Lacher) blowing open a safe and stealing a bunch of bearer bonds. However, things get complicated when the safecrackers illegally park their car (which leads to a helicopter towing it off, carrying it through the sky). Things get even more complicated when Terri’s father has a heart attack when they’re in the air and Baker and Ponch have to perform a mid-air rescue.
So, how does Baricza react to his ex-girlfriend being a criminal? We never find out. Ponch roughly lands Terri’s plane and then show pretty much ends. As a result, we don’t know what happens to Terri and her father. We don’t know if the police succeeded in catching the safecrackers. We don’t even know if Terri’s father merely passed out or if he actually died up there. Instead, Getraer makes a joke about Ponch’s terrible landing skills and we get the familiar CHiPs freeze frame.
This episode featured a lot of airshow stock footage and it was pretty obvious that the plot was secondary to showing off all of the planes doing fancy maneuvers in the sky. It felt a bit lazy on the part of the show’s producers but I also imagine that this episode was also fairly cheap to produce. There’s more stock footage than plot. As a result, the ending is a bit unsatisfying. Is Baricza upset about Terri being a criminal? Who knows? He certainly does seem to be amused by Ponch’s landing though!
Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Mondays, I will be reviewing Miami Vice, which ran on NBC from 1984 to 1989. The entire show can be purchased on Prime!
This week, Tubbs gets kidnapped and the entire episode is oddly dull. Presumably because it’s the final season and no one was paying attention, the show took a risk and it did not pay off.
Episode 5.13 “The Cell Within”
(Dir by Michael B. Hoggan, originally aired on March 10th, 1989)
Former criminal Jake Manning (John P. Ryan) has apparently reformed himself. As getting busted by Tubbs, Manning spent years in a tiny cell where he read Shakespeare and Dostoevsky. Sponsored by renegade film director Robert Phelps (L.M. Kit Carson), Jake is now a free man and a published author. Tubbs is convinced that Jake has changed his ways and when Jake invites him to a dinner party, Tubbs accepts.
(Crockett is on vacation, spending time with his son. During his brief appearance on the episode, Crockett jokes about what a great book he and Tubbs could write if they were ever arrested. Uhmm …. you were arrested, Crockett. Remember when you were a drug lord? The show appears to have forgotten but I haven’t.)
Anyway, it turns out that Jake has built a prison under his house where he keeps undesirables locked up and every few days, he electrocutes them. He kidnaps Tubbs so that Tubbs can see and hear about Jake’s view of how justice should be meted out. Jake likes to talk and talk and talk and talk.
Ugh, this episode.
I’m honestly surprised that I got through this episode because it was just so mind-numbingly dull. The show attempted to do something different with its format and that’s fine. But Jake was so long-winded and his cartoonish prisoners were such thinly drawn stereotypes that it didn’t take me long to lose interest. I’ve never liked episodes of cop shows that center around hostage situations or kidnappings. It’s hard to build much narrative momentum when no one can really move around. It gets boring to watch and that was certainly the case here. That John P. Ryan spent most of the episode wearing a flowing robe did not help matters. It made him look like a Saruman cosplayer at a Lord of the Rings convention. I probably would have laughed if it all hadn’t been so dull.
As always, it’s interesting to see Tubbs at the center of a story but even the normally smooth Philip Michael Thomas didn’t seem to know what to make of all these nonsense. As I watched Tubbs rather easily fall victim to Jake’s trap, I wondered why Tubbs has suddenly become such a stupid character. I mean, seriously, anyone should have been able to see through Manning’s invitation. For Tubbs, this episode was the equivalent of that time Trudy got kidnapped by the alien who looked like James Brown.
All in all, this was not a good episode. It’s the final season so it makes sense that you’re going to get a few clunkers. Hopefully, next week will be better.
Hi, everyone! Tonight, on twitter, I will be hosting one of my favorite films for #MondayMania! Join us for 2019’s The Wrong Stepmother!
You can find the movie on Prime and Tubi and then you can join us on twitter at 9 pm central time! (That’s 10 pm for you folks on the East Coast.) See you then!
4 Shots From 4 Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films lets the visuals do the talking.
Admittedly, it is not Bill Murray’s birthday today but it’s not really anyone else’s birthday either (and don’t you dare say Paul Mescal because you need to be around for a long while to get one of these appreciation posts). Today is Groundhog Day and, even though the production of the movie of the same name was not exactly harmonious by most accounts, it is one of the movies that has come to define everything that people love about Bill Murray.
So today, it just seem appropriate to share….
4 Shots From 4 Bill Murray Films
Ghostbusters (1984, dir by Ivan Reitman, DP: Laszlo Kovacs)
Groundhog Day (1993, Dir. by Harold Ramis, DP: John Bailey)
Rushmore (1998, dir by Wes Anderson, DP: Robert Yeoman)
Lost In Translation (2003, dir by Sofia Coppola, DP: Lance Acord)
Today’s song of the day should be stuck in everyone’s head for Groundhog Day.
Sing it, Sonny!
And Cher.
As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in hosting a few weekly live tweets on twitter and occasionally Mastodon. I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday, I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday, and I am one of the five hosts of Mastodon’s #MondayActionMovie! Every week, we get together. We watch a movie. We snark our way through it.
Tonight, for #MondayActionMovie, the film will be 1989’s Millennium!
It should make for a night of fun viewing and I invite all of you to join in. If you want to join the live tweets, just hop onto Mastodon, find the movie on YouTube and hit play at 8 pm et, and use the #MondayActionMovie hashtag! The watch party community is a friendly group and welcoming of newcomers so don’t be shy.
See you soon!
In today’s music video of the day, we visit the Church of the Ramones, where the band is energizing the congregation with a cover of The Chambers Brothers’s Time Has Come Today.
And indeed the time has come. It’s Groundhog Day! For the first time this year, someone is going to tell the future!
ENJOY!
Through the Shattered Lens