For my recent vacation in the Badlands of South Dakota with my daughter, I knew we wouldn’t be able to stream movies in the evening because the wifi bandwidth in our cabin in the park wouldn’t be broad enough. So, before we left, I downloaded to my iPad a couple of movies she hadn’t seen that I thought she’d enjoy.
One was “Cast Away,” the Robert Zemeckis film which starred Tom Hanks as a FedEx executive who survives a plane crash only to end up marooned by himself on an island somewhere in the Pacific Ocean.
Having not seen the movie in a quarter-century, I had forgotten how great Hanks was in a role that required him to carry the load solo for more than half its runtime as he had to figure out how to stay alive and maybe get off the island and be rescued. Hanks handled the full gamut of emotions perfectly, from the joyful scene in which he finally makes fire to the painful moment when he knocks out an aching tooth with an ice skate he’d found in one of the FedEx packages that washed ashore from the plane crash. I vividly recall sitting in a movie theater as the entire audience, including me, groaned and winced while watching that.
This was an era when Hanks was at the height of his movie star powers, with an amazing run of eleven big hits in twelve years, beginning with “Big” in 1988, followed in quick succession by “A League Of Their Own,” “Sleepless in Seattle,” “Philadelphia,” “Forrest Gump,” “Apollo 13,” “Toy Story,” “Saving Private Ryan,” “You’ve Got Mail,” “The Green Mile,” and then “Cast Away” in 2000.
The storytelling ability of Zemeckis and the wizardry of his special effects team certainly helped, but they didn’t get in the way of the very basic human saga of man vs. nature (with an inanimate assist from Wilson The Volleyball). Even the last 20 minutes, in which Hanks returned to civilization and went to find his former girlfriend (Helen Hunt), managed to put a lump in my throat again.
I was happy that my daughter enjoyed “Cast Away” as much as I did. If you haven’t seen it in a long time, I recommend a re-watch.
The idea for the other movie came to me five weeks ago when Val Kilmer died. She wasn’t very familiar with his career, so I told her about some of the movies he’d appeared in, including Oliver Stone’s “The Doors” from 1991. My memory was of Kilmer being terrific as Jim Morrison and, despite some weird stretches in the desert with Native Americans, I looked back on the movie fondly.
Boy, was I wrong!
“The Doors” was an absolutely pretentious piece of moviemaking about an absolutely pretentious man who became a rock star for a few years before overindulgence, booze, and drugs killed him at age 27. Worse, the movie was very sparse in its showcasing of the band creating and performing their hits. Instead, Stone spent far too much screen time displaying Morrison’s verbal excess on stage — long, rambling, drunken monologues where even fans in the audience were begging him to perform something they knew, like “Light My Fire.”
While Stone’s spotlight shone almost entirely on Morrison, the other three members of The Doors — Ray Manzarek (Kyle MacLachlan), Robbie Krieger (Frank Whaley), and John Densmore (Kevin Dillon) — were given short shrift, on and off stage. Even Meg Ryan was wasted (in more ways than one) as Morrison’s girlfriend, Pamela Courson, as were other supporting actors like Kathleen Quinlan and Michael Madsen.
I had the opportunity to interview Manzarek several years after the release of “The Doors” and asked him what he thought of it. He hemmed and hawed, trying desperately not to say anything bad, but it was clear he wasn’t a fan. I wish I’d recalled that before wasting over two hours re-watching it with my daughter, who was even less impressed than I was.