The Perfect Storm (2000)

Apparently I’m on some sort of George Clooney kick here, and why the hell not?  The man skirted the edges of obscurity for a decade, finally got his break and now he’s one of the closest things to the old Hollywood royalty set.  Most of his movies are critical darlings, and if it weren’t for him, dozens of projects would never get off the ground.  In hindsight though, I wish I’d have watched this one for the blog right after The NeverEnding Story as they’re both directed by Wolfgang Petersen.  I like it when the movies of the day are connected like that.

Anyways, look at all the tagged actors in this movie!  Admittedly, I have a fondness for character actors (“hey it’s That Guy!”) and well a lot of them won’t bring in me in any extra hits, to me they are name actors.  This movie was um, somewhat based on actual events of a real perfect storm that happened in 1991.  Something like eight hurricanes (Wikipedia is down right now, so I have no way to verify if this information is true even though I just watched the damn thing) all massed together like Voltron and wrecked havoc.  Nobody knows exactly what happened to the boat captained by Billy Tyne (Clooney) since well, they all died.  Oh, SPOILER ALERT, sorry.

It’s really hard to get excited for a movie that is going to be such a downer, and for the most part it’s fairly by-the-books.  Clooney and Mark Wahlberg are pretty much the only ship crew that really get a chance to shine, although now that I think about it, William Fichtner and John C. Reilly do get some emotional scenes as well.  Honestly, the allure of the movie isn’t the story, but the special effects and for the most part, they truly shine on Blu-Ray.

3 / 5

The NeverEnding Story (1984)

The more I watch movies from my childhood, the more I realise that I’m not a child anymore and that there’s still plenty of snark left in me.  Some of them age quite well, some I see in entirely new lights, and some I shake my head at for enjoying as much as I did.  This one is a mixture of the latter two observations, as there are numerous things that I didn’t get at the time, but it also seems so very cheesy now.

Wolfgang Petersen directed this somewhat loose adaptation of Michael Ende’s book, and it stars numerous actors who barely ever did anything else but will live on forever as these characters.  Bastian (Barret Oliver) is an imaginative young boy, dealing with the recent death of his mother.  When Bastian’s father (Gerald McRaney) tells him to keep his feet on the ground, Bastian takes the advice seriously and makes an attempt at doing just that.  Those plans are ruined when he steals a mysterious book from a bookstore and plays hooky from school to spend an entire day reading The NeverEnding Story book.  Soon, Bastian finds himself lost in the fantastical land of Fantasia and embarks on a journey of self-discovery or something.

I remembered it as being dark, even as a kid, but it still shocks me how emotionally powerful the movie is at points.  However, it doesn’t really tell much of a story of self-discovery in my opinion, just being a background for a fantasy tale that provides no real world implications for Bastian.  For example, it appears (to me at least) to break the fourth wall irreparably at one point, leading me to question what exactly the message of the movie was with its horrifying events and fearsome villains and weird heroes.

I really don’t know how kids today would take to the movie, other than dismissing it as silly and asking what a “book” is.

3 / 5