prophecy Tagged Articles at Cinematical
Scariest Villains Ever: Bears!
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Of the many things we've learned from television pundit Stephen Colbert, one of the most important is the danger of bears. On Colbert's online resource Wikiality, the Truthiness Encyclopedia, the entry on bears tells us that "Bears' strong vitality and resilience makes them one of mother nature's nearly unkillable animals. A bear has never been downed by any less than five gunshots. Combinations of high explosives, assault weapons, and trebuchets have been known to only piss the bear off."
But, you may ask, do they count as villains? Aren't scary bears in movies merely monsters, without the intellectual capacity to plot and scheme? I say bears are definitely villains, and as proof I offer three movies that feature relentless bears with more on their minds than just eating berries and looking for places to poop in the woods. Bears with purpose, with vicious intent. Bears who are, again in Mr. Colbert's words, "Godless killing machines."
Grizzly (1976)
The posters promised "18 feet of gut-crunching, man-eating terror!" (alternately, some ads also promoted "18 feet of towering fury") and indeed, Grizzly featured one large, nasty ursine villain. Sure, the whole movie was a cheesy rip-off of Jaws, which had been a phenomenal mega-blockbuster the previous year. But as cheesy rip-offs go, Grizzly is one of the best. The flick features a laundry list of 1970's B-listers like Christopher George, Richard Jaeckel and Andrew Prine, but the true star is the grizzly bear, chomping and mauling his way through a buffet of idiot campers at a state park.During the course of the film, hikers are torn asunder, cabins are smashed to bits, and the occasional deer gets dragged off to serve as a snack.
Cinematical Seven: Movies with Angels (But Only a Few Demons)
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Angels & Demons, director Ron Howard's sequel/prequel to The Da Vinci Code, is less about actual angels than it's about Action Tom Hanks running, jumping, and climbing trees to solve a city-wide Sudoku puzzle and save the world from the Illuminati. At least that's what I think it's about from watching the trailer, and from the five pages of Dan Brown's book that I read before I gave up and threw it across the room.
But it did get me thinking about angels in movies, and what a fascinating subject they are -- even when they're mishandled. Here's a few favorite movie seraphim:
1. All That Jazz - Bob Fosse's wickedly raw, musical autobio offered a luminous Jessica Lange, who appears to Roy Scheider's Fosse as a sexy angel of death, flirting and cajoling him into finally going towards the light. As the embodiment of all that Fosse found seductive in his self-destruction, Lange was a heavenly body, indeed.
2. Dogma -- Kevin Smith's irreverent examination of faith and religion cast Matt Damon and Ben Affleck as two laid-off angels headed for New Jersey, hoping to find a loophole that'll put them back in God's graces. Along the messy, uneven way, Smith gives his characters some wonderful lines -- like when the angel Metatron (Alan Rickman) explains, "Human beings have neither the aural nor the psychological capacity to withstand the awesome power of God's true voice. Were you to hear it, your mind would cave in and your heart would explode within your chest. We went through five Adams before we figured that one out."
3. Wings of Desire -- Wim Wenders' 1987 fantasy about an unhappy angel (Bruno Ganz) who longs to be human is a slow, seductive dream of a movie, full of sadness and beauty. Henri Alekan, the cinematographer who shot Jean Cocteau's Beauty And The Beast, came out of retirement to make this film, and it's a masterpiece. Plus, it's got Peter Falk, and an amazing performance by Nick Cave:
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