I seem to notice myself watching an inordinate number of "anniversary movies," and not intentionally. Sure, you might intentionally rewatch, say, The Godfather on its 50th anniversary, which is this year. But that's not what I'm talking about. I'll come across a movie on streaming that I want to watch, then notice that it's been exactly [round number of years] since it was released. Maybe the streamer thought the same thing, which is why they picked it up and are promoting it in the first place -- making it less of a coincidence.
Last night it was the Robert Zemeckis film Death Becomes Her, which did indeed come out 30 years ago in 1992. Netflix placed it prominently in its list of comedies I might like, suggesting maybe it is new to the service.
I'd always heard bad things about Death Becomes Her. It was a flop at the time despite the three luminous stars at its center, and you can probably tell from this poster that it really goes for it, tonally, which doesn't work for everyone.
Over the years, I started to hear it discussed more as an underappreciated gem, at least for its visual effects and possibly also for its story and wicked black humor. I watched it for the former, but after a bit of a rough start, got on board with the latter as well.
The effects used to twist Meryl Streep's head around that way, and to put a hole in the stomach of Goldie Hawn, are indeed quite impressive for 1992. You can look for the digital seams, as it were, but you won't find them. Even after the passage of 30 years it still looks credible. In fact, I'm not sure if anyone would have done it this credibly in another movie for another ten years after this.
That's because most people aren't Bob Zemeckis.
Ha, no, I don't know him. That's my little joke about people who refer to famous people with a variation on the name that appears in the credits, as a sign of their own perceived intimacy with this person.
But I know Robert Zemeckis' movies, having now, if you can believe this, seen every movie he's directed except for his debut feature in 1980, Used Cars. A week from now I'll be two behind again, but I plan to watch Pinocchio pretty soon after it debuts in Disney+, expecting to review it for my site.
Perhaps excluding only those first two movies -- Used Cars and his breakout, Romancing the Stone (1984) -- Zemeckis has always been interested in pushing the cinematic form beyond the feats of which it was currently capable.
The original Back to the Future (1985) may blow your mind more for its narrative innovations than its visual ones. Since it's currently my #2 on Flickchart and has been for some time, clearly it blows my own mind in every respect. But the technical ambitions are starting to be there, as Zemeckis is noodling around with challenging visual depictions to capture that Delorean traveling back through time.
His next two features were both Back to the Future sequels, and since they were shot at the same time -- which may be the first time I remember hearing that done, another innovation -- they were released in quick succession, in 1989 and 1990. There was something really satisfying about not having to wait three years for the next movie in a series, especially after the visual concepts Zemeckis had played with in Back to the Future II -- both his vision of the future, and the camera tricks he used to put two Marty McFlys on the screen at the same time, which also reflected a further narrative innovation, building exponentially on the logic of the first movie. While I consider both sequels to be disappointing in certain ways, there's no doubt that both are progressing Zemeckis further on his journey of breaking technical ground.
The very next film was Death Becomes Her, a black comedy that almost certainly seemed like a step backward in the public's perception of him as the next Steven Spielberg or James Cameron. In this film, both Streep's character and Hawn's character consume a magical potion -- proffered to them by a young and mostly naked Isabella Rosselini -- that stops the aging process. Unbeknownst to them, it also makes them impervious to things like being pushed down a long flight of stairs, or being shot through the stomach with a shotgun.
Naturally, Zemeckis doesn't scrimp, for an instant, on these effects, even though this film was certainly not conceived as another blockbuster franchise, or even a film expecting to get a sequel. It could never have been anything more than a one-off black comedy, and in retrospect, it works like gangbusters in that respect, even if audiences couldn't recognize it at the time.
It was a short slump for Zemeckis as he immediately came back with Forrest Gump (1994), which won countless Oscars, including the big one, and also nabbed him his first and only statue to date for directing. This was the first time Zemeckis used visual effects to tell a more naturalistic story, trying not to draw attention to his own innovations. Don't forget the seamless effects to render Gary Sinise legless, and to allow Tom Hanks to play ping pong at lightning speed.
Contact (1997) was another big swing visually, and another home run as far as this critic is concerned. Its conception of the distant reaches of space -- from an opening pull-out shot to the deepest depths of the galaxy and beyond, all the way through to the closing credits -- was Interstellar nearly 20 years before Christopher Nolan thought of Interstellar.
His next two movies, both released in 2000, were a step back in terms of visual invention, as far as I remember. Both What Lies Beneath and Cast Away are mostly realistic films, though it wouldn't surprise me to hear either film contained something that would only be possible with some clever visual manipulation, or use of cutting edge technology.
But The Polar Express in 2004 marked a turn for Zemeckis that has basically defined the rest of his career. He started dabbling in motion capture, and even though everyone talks about The Polar Express as the prime example of the "uncanny valley" -- that weird effect when something looks too realistic to be animated, but still dead-eyed, off in some unspecified way -- it's hard not to acknowledge what a ground-breaking effort it was, visually. (The story, that's another topic -- don't get me started, as Chris Van Allsburg's book is still something my family reads every Christmas Eve.)
His next two movies doubled down on what he had done in The Polar Express -- and were, predictably, better efforts both visually and narratively. (It wasn't predictable that they would be better narratively, but they could hardly be worse.) In fact, I kind of love both Beowulf (2007) and A Christmas Carol (2009), both of which I saw in the theater in 3D when that was still a thing. They both landed between 10 and 20 on my year-end rankings, and I found them both to be invigorating, immersive experiences. It's been too long since I've seen either of them and I think it's time to rectify that. (But maybe not until December for A Christmas Carol.)
Flight (2012) and The Walk (2015) are both what I think of as "heightened reality" movies, movies that exist within the realm of realism but could not be portrayed as they were without the use of cutting edge visual effects. I've only seen Flight once -- I'm not that high on it, no pun intended -- but if memory serves, the "plane flying upside down" stuff was a challenging visual exercise, the kind that would have drawn Zemeckis to the material. The Walk is the one I really love -- it couldn't quite break into my top ten in 2015 (knocking at the door at #12), but it's an imaginatively conceived narrative version of the documentary Man on Wire, about the French tightrope walker who walked between the twin towers of the World Trade Center in the 1970s. Those sequences are breathtaking, especially in 3D.
Don't worry, we're almost to the present.
I was pretty "meh" on Allied (2016), which feels more like a straight prestige project inspired by something like Casablanca. But Zemeckis made easily his worst film in 2018 with Welcome to Marwen, another narrative version of a documentary I love (Marwencol). This is one of the most Zemeckis movies Zemeckis has ever made -- the miniature figurines laid out on a recreated World War II set in the back yard of a trauma victim come to life with more cutting edge effects, which differ from those Zemeckis has used previously. But the acting and script are both cringe-worthy in this film, and I never want to watch it again -- even for the effects.
Finally, you have Roald Dahl's The Witches in 2020, which was better than it had any right to be as a result of its ghoulish witch effects and its animation of talking mice.
Looking beyond Pinocchio, which should be another consummately Zemeckis film, you've got 2023's Here, which is synopsized on IMDB as such: "Set in one single room, follows the many people who inhabit it over years and years, from the past to the future." Sounds a bit like A Ghost Story, in which case, I am in and then some. Then only in the announced phase is The King, set in the Hawaiian islands -- which seems like a good next canvas for him to ply his trade.
In a way, you could say Zemeckis is as busy as he's ever been at age 70 -- as excited as he's ever been about the possibilities of cinema.
Zemeckis has managed to have this sort of career without ever fully become a household name, like the aforementioned Steven Spielberg or James Cameron, or like a newer visual innovator such as Christopher Nolan. Given some of the titles he's associated with, one wonders what a man has to do to level up to greater public awareness. Maybe it's that his last name is not as easy to remember as Spielberg or Cameron or Nolan. It's all ethnic and such. (The name is of Lithuanian origin.)
Well, especially considering that he directed my #2 of all time, I'm proud to almost be able to call myself a Zemeckis completist. I should really prioritize seeing Used Cars. Who knows what sort of visual innovations it may contain.
