Steve McQueen

Our summer TV fare this summer has featured a lot of trips to the Turner Classic Movies On Demand channel, and lately we’ve been checking out a number of films featuring one of Hollywood’s biggest stars of the ’60s and ’70s — Steve McQueen.  We’ve watched some of his most memorable movies, including The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, The Cincinnati Kid, The Sand Pebbles, Bullitt, The Thomas Crown Affair, and Papillon.

Steve McQueen was an iconic figure, and I’m not sure that any actor since has created the kind of distinctive persona that McQueen so firmly established.  He was the ultra-cool, imperturbable character who didn’t say much, comfortably moved on the fringes of society, and wasn’t beholden to conventional behavior or lifestyles.  And his most popular roles contributed to that particular persona — like The Great Escape, where McQueen played “The Cooler King,” an unflappable prisoner of war who constantly tried to escape and was routinely sent to the “cooler” for solitary confinement, where he entertained himself by bouncing a baseball off the wall of his cell and catching it, and Bullitt, where he played a tough-as-nails police detective who didn’t show a drop of sweat during the film’s classic car chase scene through the streets of San Francisco.

My favorite McQueen film is The Magnificent Seven — it’s one of those movies that I will always stop to watch if I see that it is on — but the films we found to be a bit of a revelation were The Sand Pebbles, where McQueen played a disaffected sailor serving on a U.S. gunboat during troubled times in China in the 1920s, and Papillon, where McQueen played a French prisoner serving time in a notorious prison camp in French Guiana who never loses his iron determination to live and reach freedom.  McQueen wasn’t just the walking embodiment of cool — the guy really could act, and he was nominated for a best actor award for his work in The Sand Pebbles.

Kudos to Turner Classic Movies for screening multiple films for certain actors that allow us to take a deep dive into the career of one of Hollywood’s most memorable stars.

 

Hopeless Hollywood Sameness

Yesterday Kish and I decided to go see a movie.  It’s been hot as blazes in Columbus recently, and humid, too, and the idea of sitting for a few hours in an air-conditioned movie theater watching an interesting film was very attractive.

We haven’t been to the movies in a while because, candidly, the array of films offered this summer hasn’t been very appealing.  We have a narrow window of consensus — Kish can’t stand sci-fi and superhero movies, and I groan at the idea of sitting through some deep study of dysfunctional families — but we thought we’d give Jason Bourne a shot.

Several hours later, after we’d been assaulted by loud, chaotic, and grossly improbable non-stop action, we emerged with the realization that Hollywood apparently has run out of ideas.  I think I may have seen part of an actual Jason Bourne movie in the past, but I’ve definitely seen this movie before — over and over and over again.  The film is so trite and formulaic that it immediately seemed like I was watching a rerun.  Even Matt Damon, who typically makes interesting films, couldn’t salvage it.  If you’re considering going to watch it, save your money.

Take every car chase scene you’ve seen since The French Connection, Bullitt, and The Blues Brothers movie, make them louder and longer and more destructive, and move them to Athens and the Vegas strip.  Input a rote, duplicitous bad guy with absolutely no redeeming qualities as the evil head of the the CIA and expect the audience to root for him to be killed.  Take an ambitious female agent with ambiguous loyalties off the shelf.  Add in an unbeatable hero with superhuman intellectual and physical capabilities and have him tracked by another apparently unstoppable cold-blooded killer who he has to fight at the climax.  That’s the plot.  Sound familiar?

The summer movie season used to feature inventive, different movies, like Jaws and Raiders of the Lost Ark and Star Wars and Forrest Gump.  That’s no longer the case.  Now we get sequels, remakes, and canned, tried-and-true formulaic crap.  It’s no wonder that the box office receipts are down this summer.  What we’re getting from Hollywood these days really sucks.