‘The Movies’ Review: A Hollywood Highlight Reel – Wall Street Journal

By

That it will do. What should have been called “The American Movies” (or, if they wanted to be honest, something with “Box Office” or “Highest Grossing” in the title), the series is essentially a highlights film with commentary—much of it banal, redundant and/or utterly subjective. As advertised, the show is intended to explore American cinema “through the decades and the cultural, societal and political shifts that framed its evolution.” But there’s much less of that than there are filmmakers and performers stroking each other about their wonderful work. Or telling us what we’re about to see. Or telling us what we just saw.

The presence of many of these talking heads is inexplicable, especially after they talk: Hosts from Turner Classic Movies and an editor from the website Rotten Tomatoes offer canned commentary. But then the viewer says “duh”: TCM and Rotten Tomatoes are both owned, wholly or in part, by WarnerMedia, as is, of course, CNN. I’m still wondering what political commentator John Heilemann is doing in the mix.

The executive producers include Tom Hanks, Gary Goetzman and Mark Herzog, who worked together on the earlier, well-regarded CNN miniseries on the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s and 2000s. “The Movies,” unfortunately, seems blinkered by its creators’ proximity to the industry, and their elevated, patrician regard for it. Despite the fact that the ’80’s brought us “Friday the 13th,” “A Nightmare on Elm Street” and “The Evil Dead,” horror cinema is ignored save for “Poltergeist” and “The Shining,” which have loftier pedigrees. Series like “The Naked Gun” were apparently too down-market for the “The Movies.” Foreign films? Forget it. Not even “My Left Foot” gets a mention, never mind “Das Boot,” “Fitzcarraldo,” “Ran” or the films of John Woo.Jim Jarmusch does get a glancing look, but indies are otherwise ignored. Every frame produced by Steven Spielberg, on the other hand, seems to have been addressed, examined and ultimately adored.

No, they couldn’t include everything. But what is here doesn’t always get a frank appraisal either. “The Eighties,” the first installment here, begins by looking at the 1981 Oscar showdown between Martin Scorsese’s “Raging Bull” and Robert Redford’s “Ordinary People,” a face-off Mr. Redford ultimately won. (His film took Best Picture; he was named Best Director.) For all the ruminations about the domestic drama vs. the boxing movie, the contest always seemed to be about something simpler, and cruder, namely the choice between a Hollywood star and a New York-based director. The actor-turned-director almost always seems to have an edge at the Academy Awards (see: Kevin Costner, Mel Gibson, Warren Beatty). And that scenario makes more sense than Oscar voters actually weighing the merits and deciding the Redford film was better.

American movies dominate the world, and there’s no way they wouldn’t dominate a program like this. Also, there are moments of bona-fide criticism, and people offering genuine insights—Lawrence Kasdan, for one (who wrote and directed “Silverado,” which isn’t mentioned, and “The Big Chill,” which is, at length). The cinema of the ’80s, Mr. Kasdan says, was telling us that “how things look were not the way they are” as clips from “Blue Velvet” and “The Shining” illuminate his statements. The online critic Drew McWeeny (aka Moriarty) makes cogent points about the huge impact of “Saturday Night Live” on movie comedy, a wave that included “Ghost Busters” and “Caddyshack.” (“The Movies,” characteristically, pays less attention to “Three Amigos” and “Spies Like Us.”)

And there’s an enlightening segment about the denouement of “Fatal Attraction,” which underwent numerous audience-preview-inspired alterations until arriving at what was most acceptable to the crowd—namely the wife shooting the mistress in the bathtub. (Sorry if that’s a spoiler, the movie is 32 years old.)

It’s delightful to hear such praise of the kind the program bestows on an under-sung classic like “The Verdict,” which should have won Paul Newman an Oscar, and to hear director James Mangold wax so eloquent on the techniques of director Sidney Lumet. It’s bewildering to see Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil” addressed as one of the great dystopic works of the decade, while nothing is said about the battle to get the movie released by Universal—something that only happened after the Los Angeles Critics Association named it the best film of 1985. If you’re going to make a movie about “The Movies,” it should be more than clips of “E.T.” and the 1,000th replay of the diner scene from “When Harry Met Sally.” In the end, of course, “The Movies” wants us to have what she’s having.