For the last ten years, give or take, Bruce Willis’ star has fallen considerably, thanks to an increasingly inept collection of dour, poor-quality DTV action movies. Most have been shot overseas, and Willis’s involvement rarely stretches beyond about fifteen minutes of screen time. Outside of “return to form” performances in Rian Johnson’s 2012 sci-fi thriller, Looper and Shyamalan’s trilogy-ender Glass (and, if you ask me, a pretty fun job in Eli Roth’s 2017 Death Wish remake), Willis has transformed from the smirking “common man” action hero and Planet Hollywood superstar into the butt of jokes. With titles like Out of Death, Cosmic Sin, First Kill, and Midnight in The Switchgrass, a once stellar and iconic career has been reduced to Redbox fodder. Now, however, it appears we won’t even have Bruno to kick around anymore.

Willis and his family announced today that the actor has been diagnosed with aphasia, a brain disorder which gradually robs you of the ability to communicate in, really, any way. It’s a bleak diagnosis for Willis, who just turned 67 a few days ago, and it means he is stepping away from acting. It also explains many of the decisions he’s had to make in recent years. All the insults and barbs feel nasty and mean now, because Willis needed to work, but his cognitive decline was getting the best of him in recent years. We may not be getting any new Bruce Willis movies, but this tragic diagnosis and subsequent retirement should make us all stop and think back to when Willis was the coolest dude in the world.

Though his film career didn’t officially begin with Die Hard (he already had the abysmal Blake Edwards comedies Blind Date and Sunset under his belt), for all intents and purposes, the 1988 action masterpiece sent him to the moon. Willis’s John McClane was a guy you might have known. His biceps weren’t slick and huge, he had a wiseass nature about him, and everything he was doing to save the day in John McTiernan’s film felt real. Like maybe… just maybe, you might be able to pull it off under the right circumstances. This new action hero was also flawed, stressed out, conflicted. Everything wasn’t easy for him, and he was always on the verge of a nervous breakdown. And Willis made it all seem so charming. It was a breath of fresh air for everyone looking for a more realistic action hero than the 80s domination of Stallone and Schwarzenegger, and it would forever be Willis’s most iconic role.

The rest of Willis’s career was a mixture of success and failure, and the variance is staggering at times. Just as he would hit it big in Die Hard 2 or Look Who’s Talking (which showed the power of simply his voice), Willis would stumble with The Bonfire of The Vanities and Hudson Hawk, the latter of which was a passion project that couldn’t find an audience. However, these days, one would have a hard time finding a modern adventure/comedy as unique and utterly weird and entertaining as Hudson Hawk.

Speaking of weird, whenever Willis was given the chance to step out of his tough wiseass persona into a more offbeat, quirky role (a rare occasion), he would crush it; he is marvelous in Death Becomes Her, playing against type as a Dr. Ernest Menville, a spineless, pallid plastic surgeon who is way in over his head with two immortal bitches pulling him in all directions.

If I were pressed into picking five favorites from Willis’s career, the list would, of course, start with Die Hard. From there, a dozen candidates would vie for the other four. Pulp Fiction is the best movie he’s ever been in, hands down. His turn as Butch was such a surprise in 1994, as Willis had fallen on hard times with a pair of big time box-office losers, Striking Distance and the notoriously awful Rob Reiner bomb North. 12 Monkeys is one of his most fascinating performances, all tired desperation and grimy perseverance. It’s remarkable, and the pairing of Terry Gilliam and Willis feels like lightning in a bottle. Die Hard with a Vengeance belongs on this very short list – easily the second-best entry in the franchise – as does his first two Shyamalan films, The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable.

But what about Corbin Dallas The Fifth Element? What about 16 Blocks, his late-career actioner and the final film of Richard Donner’s storied career? And, despite the fact he terrorized late director Tony Scott, The Last Boy Scout is a low-key work of mad genius that should never have worked as well as it did. These are solid films, borderline great films, and they somehow only scratch the surface of Bruce Willis as a movie star. His diversity has always been under-appreciated.

That is why so many “clunkers” in Willis’s early career have begun to appreciate as the years tick away, because the Willis Charm is just too powerful to deny over time. Color of Night, for example, one of the hackiest, most ill-conceived Basic Instinct ripoffs to come out of a long run of ripoffs. And, well… it’s still pretty bad. But oh my goodness is it bad in the best kinds of ways, and Bruce Willis is at the peak of his melodramatic phase here. His hair is a little dainty, he’s fragile, he’s captivatingly campy. A few years later, there’s a blockbusting return to form in Armageddon, which worked as a transitional sort of picture for Willis. He was back to being the action star, but his death at the end is significant moment in Willis’s career; he’d never had to die saving the day before.

There are a handful of other awesome bad movies in Bruce Willis’s career: Striking Distance is maybe one of the biggest action turds to get a theatrical release, but I’ve seen it a dozen times. The same goes for The Jackal, Last Man Standing, Mercury Rising, The Siege… these are all films seemingly lost to time, but if you stop and think about them you can find redeeming qualities in them all. And, more often than not, that sort of warped value starts with the smirking hero (or, in the case of The Siege, the very serious villain) in the middle of the action.

Willis’s last arguably great movie was Looper, where Joseph Gordon Levitt played a young Willis thanks to some amusing facial prosthetics. His next movie was A Good Day to Die Hard, or Die Hard 5, or “this movie does not exist,” whatever you want to call it. From there, the misses began to outweigh the hits, and mileage may vary on what constitutes a “good” movie or a “hit” movie. Willis was slammed for Death Wish, but it’s a take on the source material that’s endlessly watchable. There are the Red films, the first much better than the second, there is Glass, and there is Motherless Brooklyn… and dozens of DTV movies that make much more sense now, given the tragic news.

It would be difficult to think of an action star that means more to me than Bruce Willis. He was the king of my favorite genre from the time I was seven to well into my adult years. It’s definitely been a shame what’s become of his career these past few years, but the recent diagnosis puts it all in perspective. It also helps to remind you of the greatness Bruce Willis once embodied.

Recently, I haphazardly stumbled into a Twitter debate over Peter Weir’s 1989 Best Picture nominee, Dead Poets Society, and what it’s ultimately trying to say in its tragic final act and subsequently rousing conclusion. The consensus, at least in the thread in which I found myself, was that Robin Williams’ subversive English teacher, Mr. John Keating, was actually the bad guy in the end. Revisionist takes are nothing new to modern movie culture (Waterworld is good! Forrest Gump has… issues…), and often times these new “takes” are perfectly acceptable, if not the truth about the film or the performance in question.

Not this time, however.

I can’t get on board with an opinion that takes so many interpretive leaps and connections that aren’t in the text – or even the subtext – of Weir’s magnificent, bittersweet film. Calling Mr. Keating the bad guy of Dead Poets Society is an easy, albeit incorrect, opinion to have when the film fades from memory and you get older and think maybe the parents are right. The gist of the Keating is Bad camp is that Keating’s message – for his timid young students to “seize the day” and become free thinkers – led Neil Perry (Robert Sean Leonard) to commit suicide after his father forbade him from participating in the theater.

Aside from this being textually untrue based on scenes in the film, to say Keating is somehow more at fault for Neil’s decision than Mr. Perry (Kurtwood Smith), an overbearing, controlling villain in Neil’s life (and, it’s important to remember, his entire life beyond school or English class), is absurd. This is an opinion that requires several assumptions without the screenplay, or even the final scenes, indicating such an egregious moral error. At no point, in no way, does Keating pit Neil against his father; never, not once, does he say that life is not worth living if you don’t get what you want. Keating’s “seize the day” mantra is never intended to be a life or death creed, but a chance at an awakening. Many times in the film, we see the positive nature of Keating’s influence seeping into these kids – prisoners of their parents’ expectations – and so many of them have their eyes opened to a new way to see the world.

Including Neil Perry.

The central characters in the student ensemble* all change. Ethan Hawke’s Todd Anderson is so meek and frightened of the world he can barely speak in the early scenes; by the end, he is a young man, willing and capable. When Keating sees these awakenings through, and they are positive, the result is wonderful, electric. But don’t discount Keating’s ability as an adult and a guardian to his students. When Charlie Dalton (Gale Hansen) risks his future with a school prank, it is Keating’s compassionate and level-headed scorn that gets through to him. Keating is not endorsing recklessness at any point in Dead Poets Society, rather he is pulling these young impressionable boys out of the shadow of their father in the best way he knows how.

When Neil comes to Keating before the first Midsummer Night’s Dream performance, with concerns about his father’s disapproval, the message he gets from Keating is anything but fatalistic. And, more importantly, it does not pit father against son, but quite the opposite:

With this scene alone, we can see Keating’s motives clearly. And we can see how, under all the histrionics, that Keating is reasonable and wise. That was the power of Robin Williams in dramatic roles, his ability to reign in the wild man routine and dial up the emotion. Keating knows what has to happen with Neil and his father, and he pushes them towards each other, not away. Neil’s lie that his father approved of him being in the play is not Keating’s fault, and it’s bizarre to even assume that’s reality.

The opinion that to get older is to side with any of the parents or stodgy teachers and administrators in Dead Poets Society comes from conservative thinking which, in my opinion, is sometimes (often) the correct revisionist perspective to have. But as new conservatism tends to just be classic liberalism in many cultural avenues, this interpretation goes too far, and it takes us back to the times before Rebel Without a Cause gave young teenagers a voice in culture. It erases autonomy and it absolves the father of any and all responsibility, and it puts us at the table of assholes perched at the front of the cafeteria.

The kids understand Keating is not to blame. That’s why the final scene with the boys standing on top of their desks, saying farewell to a man who reached them in ways they didn’t think were possible, retains its power. There is an argument that Keating needed to go after Neil’s death simply because of his closeness to the situation, but even that is debatable. There is simply no evidence that Keating’s words or actions or message steered Neil towards his fate.

In fact, any scene or exchange you could uncover in the film would likely prove the opposite was true.

* The “central character” students may vary depending on your interpretation of who is and isn’t one of the nucleus of performers, but let’s just say it’s Hawke, Leonard, Josh Charles as Knox and Gale Hansen’s Charlie.

Choosing De Palma, a commercially hit-or-miss stylist with a gleeful approach to cinematic storytelling, was a curious choice for Cruise; on the outside, the pairing didn’t seem like the most apt duo to bring the Peter Graves starring television show to theaters. De Palma had been on a rollercoaster in recent years; from the overwhelming success of The Untouchables to flops like Raising Cain and Casualties of War – and one spectacular disaster in Bonfire of The Vanities, the auteur had moderately rebounded with Carlito’s Way in 1993 before taking on a summer tentpole. It didn’t make sense, at least at first, but the end result is arguably the greatest summer blockbuster of its era – and it is still, 25 years and six entries later – the best entry into the immutable franchise.

Fans of the TV series, which ran from 1966-1973 on CBS, were the target audience for Mission: Impossible prior to its release, so imagine their surprise when the first act of the film involves completely wiping out the Impossible Missions Force team, ostensibly killing Jim Phelps (Jon Voight) and leaving Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt (an entirely new character made for Cruise) the last man standing. De Palma, Cruise, and screenwriters David Koepp and Robert Towne dismantled everything audiences expected in the first half hour, a bold stroke for a summer blockbuster; fortunately, the plans they had in the aftermath of the IMF purge told a florid, fascinating story, full of twists and turns, and almost instantly iconic in its set pieces.

As with many Brian De Palma pictures, the set pieces are the allure, and the most revered in M:I is the Langley heist where Hunt is left dangling inches from the white pressure-sensitive floor, sweating, in the shaky grasp of the most unreliable and, ultimately, villainous Jean Reno. The final showdown in the tunnel between bullet train and helicopter, again with Reno, which ends with Hunt being propelled through the air via fireball, was inexplicably shown in every teaser and trailer leading up to the film’s release. While they are both terrific and tense, Ethan Hunt’s early escape from Kittridge in the Prague restaurant is the most thrilling and dynamic set piece. It is quick and exciting and the first of many awe-inspiring stunts Tom Cruise executes across six movies. The lead up to the explosion is a clinic on ramping up tension:

At the time, the labyrinthine plot, and especially Hunt’s internal navigation through what really happened in Prague once Jim Phelps reveals himself to be alive, was a major source of audience consternation. I remember as a fifteen-year old, completely losing the thread when Hunt is laying out what Phelps wants to hear, all the while going over what truly went down in his mind at the same time. Now, the scene works exactly as it is intended, it doesn’t seem as complex as it once did, but in 1996 this was an issue for general audiences.

Mission: Impossible opened on Memorial Day weekend in 1996, and the extended holiday-weekend haul was over $50 million before raking in $74.9 million when the dust settled Tuesday morning. It was the biggest opening weekend of all time to that point, nearly recuperating the film’s $80 million budget in one weekend – for comparison, 2018’s Fallout had a $178 million budget. Mission: Impossible ended its run with $180.9 million in the bank, and a franchise starter that has been going on for a quarter of a century with the same star. Think Sean Connery in James Bond films all the way through the 1980s.

Mission: Impossible is sleek, smart, and it remains the most aesthetically beautiful film of the franchise. It was the pinnacle of what summer blockbusters could be at the time, and it’s arguably superior to just about any summer blockbuster this side of Spielberg’s shark. The combination of Cruise and De Palma outmatched any combination of director and star at the time, relatively speaking, and the De Palma stamp on this franchise starter is one of the main reasons why Mission: Impossible is still the best entry. So many people in 2021 sing the praises of M:I 4, 5, and 6, in particular, and while I do love those sequels wholeheartedly, nothing will sway me from the original being the pinnacle of the franchise, and quite possibly the peak of blockbuster filmmaking. In the middle of a decade when summer blockbusters were only getting bigger, louder, and dumber, De Palma and Cruise took Paramount’s money and crafted a smart, suspenseful, brilliant classic.

Twister is nothing more than a funhouse ride, but it may very well be the best most effective, most lasting funhouse ride of the decade, at least for someone – like yours truly – who has spent their entire life in different regions of Tornado Alley. Like so many traditional tales of man versus beast, or many versus nature, the tornadoes here represent a menacing stalker; they’re collectively the shark in Jaws, the T-Rex in Jurassic Park.

This was also Bill Paxton’s first attempt at leading a major blockbuster, after years spent lighting up the screen in some of the best supporting roles of his generation, from Aliens to True Lies. He had been the lead in a number of smaller films, and part of a large ensemble in movies like Tombstone and Apollo 13, but here Paxton was the hero, and his earnestness is ideal for the wonky screenplay. Paxton is the lead alongside Helen Hunt, who had been a star on NBC with Mad About You but was ready to take the step into leading lady territory. She gives more to Twister than Michael Crichton’s silly screenplay calls for, and it’s a delight to see her commit to this role, especially knowing she was about to start a run as one of the most successful actresses in Hollywood for the remainder of the 90s.

The summer of 1996 was the next step in the CGI evolution… revolution? Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park – a couple of years after Terminator 2 – began to show audiences and studios what was possible with new computer technology in 1993. By the time ’96 rolled around, the sandbox was bigger and more advanced; Twister was essentially Jurassic Park with tornadoes, and the big diversion is style and substance boils down to two different filmmakers interpreting Crichton’s absurd dialogue and scientific mumbo jumbo like “it’s backbuilding” and “we’ve got sisters!” Spielberg’s natural ability to create empathy and build insurmountable moments of suspense in Jurassic Park define the moments in that film in between the big dinosaur shots; Jan de Bont, fresh off the success of Speed – a masterpiece of action cinema – was much more interested in the wild chaos of killer cyclones.

Twister gets almost all of its exposition out of the way in the first act, save for a dinner scene midway through. De Bont wasn’t hired for, nor was he interested in, the thin romantic triangle between Paxton, Hunt, and a pant-suited punching bag fiancé played by Jami Gertz. He shows us these scenes and lets his two stars charm the audience, but the end result is obvious from the beginning and these scenes are either short dramatic moments, or handled in the midst of one of the CGI set pieces.

The only reason Twister really exists is right there in the title, and in 1996 the sight of these swirling sky demons in Dolby Digital was a rousing experience. The first “chase” with Paxton and Hunt in the yellow truck remains, in my humble opinion, the best pure tornado action scene in the film. The rest of the twister scenes involve any number of variables, from cows to twin twisters to The Shining at a drive-in theater, but this first one is a beautiful moment of pop cinema:

Nowadays, Twister is a bit hokey, a bit dated, but that doesn’t matter; it’s no less fun. It’s just that the fun of de Bont’s picture has evolved into that sweet spot of honest reverence and amusing irony. At the time the anticipation was palpable, particularly down here in Tornado Alley. Audiences responded with It a dominant $41 million opening weekend; the film would run through the end of August and rake in $237.4 million, good for second place all year behind Independence Day, and ahead of a slew of hit movies. It was the last big triumph for de Bont, who would never recover from the following summer’s calamitous Speed 2. But at this moment in time, he knew what the people wanted from their big, dumb, summer disaster movie, and was able to channel his inner Roland Emmerich while not losing his superior stylistic decisions in the process. This was the next step in CGI, and the images hold up, save for a few seams here and there.

And that cow… it still doesn’t work. Never did.

Are you the sniveling, selfish weasel who has to impress with cash and goods to keep your friends around, but folds under the slightest bit of pressure? Let’s hope not.

Stephen Hopkins’ Judgment Night, one of the most underrated thrillers of the nineties, is a brutal and propulsive adventure through the bowels of a Chicago hellscape where the façade of suburban safety is stripped from our quartet of protagonists, piece by piece, until all they have left is who, and what, they really are. It’s a litmus test for what it means to be a man, and what being a man means when faced with almost certain death. When your world is blown up in a fiery explosion, in a precarious part of town, and you’re left with only wits and stamina, which kind of man are you going to be?

Our central hero is Frank, played by Emilio Estevez. Frank is a new father, and he looks appropriately exhausted after three months at home with his wife and their new daughter. He wants a night out with his friends, “just a couple of guys going to a boxing match,” though his wife, Linda, gives him plenty of shit for suggesting he needs a break more than her. Nevertheless, she acquiesces, despite the fact she doesn’t care for Frank’s juvenile, childless, unmarried buddies.

Frank’s closest friend is Mike, a handsome, cocksure bachelor played by Cuba Gooding, Jr. Mike never outgrew his college days, and Linda knows it. Jeremy Piven is Ray, the fast-talking charlatan of the group who managed to coerce an RV dealer into letting him take one of their shiny new models off the lot for a night out on the town. Rounding out the quartet of normal dudes is John, played by Stephen Dorff; John is Frank’s younger brother, who seems to barely have a grip on this whole “adulthood” phenomenon. John is an irresponsible hothead, not to mention a last second replacement for a friend who couldn’t make it.

Of course, things do not go as planned for the guys on their way to the boxing match in downtown Chicago. They take an ill-advised detour into the slums and run afoul of Fallon (Denis Leary, never better), a murderous small-time gangster with a claim to the streets and a chip on his shoulder. Anyone who’s seen the film knows the outcome of our four innocents as they try and make it across a deliberately empty city that resembles a waking nightmare. Throughout this hellacious night, the superficiality of common male companionship is stripped away, and what springs up in the wake of this deconstruction is where Judgment Night becomes more than just another bargain basement thriller.

When Frank and his pals hit the road and leave the safe confines of suburbia behind, they may be different men underneath, but they all give off the same sense of bloviating badassery, however false it may be. They drink Budweiser, they make jokes at each other’s expense, they like sports. Before long, however, every common bond they share is gone, and the only commonality they now share is surviving the night. Each man handles the situation differently, with varying degrees of fear and confidence, and it lays out a set of templates with which the men in the audience could identify.

Every man who watches Judgment Night probably sees themselves as one of three. They may identify with Frank in this situation, a family man who remains calm and pragmatic, but who has plenty of fight in him when pushed to the breaking point. Some might try and say they would be like Mike, tough and confident all the way through; perhaps even a little too confident, but a strong Alpha nonetheless. Others would identify with John, the younger brother with a short fuse who’s ready to fight, because it’s the one thing he’s good at.

Nobody would ever willingly identify with Ray, not without a hint of irony. Once the common tropes of friendship are stolen from these four men, it’s Ray who shrivels. He is a coward, he is selfish, and he thinks he can money whip Fallon into letting them go free. Of course, he pays for this attempted bribery with his life – the only casualty of the group – and the film tells us he probably deserved it. He was always the last one over the fence and the first one to complain; the way he acts in the face of impending doom is repulsive, so he has to be thrown off the roof to get him out of the way.

A man would never say he would act the way Ray does in the film, but the truth is, most of us have a little Ray in us. Even though we’re certain we would fight to save our family, or that we would walk across that makeshift wooden bridge between the rooftops of project apartments, or we would grab a heavy iron pipe and hold our ground, odds are we would at least consider talking to the villains nipping at our heels because, well, it’s just easier than all this physical maneuvering. Survival instincts aren’t the same from person to person.

Some of us may even have a little of Fallon in our bones. Fallon is single-minded in his ultimate goal to eliminate four murder witnesses, but Denis Leary gives the character more, whether it’s in the classic Leary-style rant about class he gives to Ray on the rooftop, or the way he looks the picture of Frank’s family he finds in Frank’s wallet. It’s a mix of anger, contempt, and jealousy. Fallon will never have that sort of domestic life, and while he may scoff at the simplistic safety of Frank’s world, the softness of their idyllic existence, Leary makes it clear that, under an outward disgust that often manifests itself in psychotic, violent ways, he envies the security of suburbia. It’s the sort of envy we all harbor somewhere in us; hopefully, it would never boil to the surface this way.

Which man are you?

But all is not lost. Certain portions of the industry may be suffering, and it’s hurting many people in all the regular economic ways. Beyond that, the cultural gap between traditional Hollywood and flyover country is growing at an alarming rate now. But, from great change an upheaval comes great opportunities in the void. Now is the time for smaller films to sneak into the mainstream and new distribution circles to spring up somewhere other than Southern California. It’s time for pioneers to build their brand, and that’s clearly what The Daily Wire is attempting to do with their dynamite new action-thriller, Run Hide Fight.

Controversy surrounds both The Daily Wire and the very existence of Kyle Rankin’s school shooting action flick, arguably one of the best Die Hard riffs in 25 years. Any hubbub over the involvement of Ben Shapiro’s news company, with a film produced by Cinestate’s scandalized founder (now the head man of Bonfire Legend) Dallas Sonnier, is empty and useless when it comes to the picture in question. Most of the backlash is just posturing from a group of lemmings; early reviews of Run Hide Fight on Letterboxd has half star ratings with crybabies sobbing about The Daily Wire and Shapiro. Rotten Tomatoes has it at 22% positive with “professional critics” and 97% with general audiences, which probably tells you all you need to know. It’s pitiful, because in their act of brave online heroism where they slam a movie they refused to watch, or one they reluctantly hate watch, it turns out they missed a pretty good one.

The star of Run Hide Fight is Isabel May, who plays Zoe Hull, a hardened high school senior who has shut herself off from just about everyone after the death of her mother. We still see her mother, played by Radha Mitchell in conversational flashes, a gimmick that shouldn’t work as well as it does. Zoe barely talks to her retired military father, played by Thomas Jane, and her only friend is Lewis (Olly Shotolan), who fancies her for the upcoming prom. She knows how to handle a weapon, sure, but she isn’t some sort of gun toting NRA spokesperson in sheep’s clothing. Even the tattered green Army jacket she wears – her father’s – is more of a protective barrier from social interaction than any sort of outward projection.

Thanks to the sort of contrivance that’s all but required in these siege films, Zoe is in the bathroom when three wayward seniors drive a van full of explosives into the cafeteria windows and begin shooting innocent students dead on the spot. This is the most upsetting stretch of the film, but Rankin’s screenplay makes a wise choice to tell the story he wants to tell, while making the medicine go down in what could be an increasingly grim and dyspeptic picture. The villains, led by Eli Brown’s manic, moody Tristan, have an approach to the bleak materials like action movie villains. There is a heightened level of their villainy to pull us ever so slightly away from a reality that would be too harsh. Had this film leaned into the dour mood with truly unsettled, lost teens, not these arcane versions of baddies, the action beats wouldn’t be so effective.

Zoe gradually transforms into a high school version of John McClane, but not the superhero pinball of Live Free or Die Hard and Die Hard… 5 (whatever that one was called). This eighteen-year old female version of John McClane is from the original Die Hard: reluctant, outgunned, tough, resilient, burdened with family tensions. She slinks through air ducts and endures one substantial wound after another until she’s bloodied and broken, all the while saving countless students and teachers; the entire structure of Run Hide Fight is a clever callback to John McTiernan’s classic. It’s also a movie that shines a light on certain flaws and loopholes in school security procedures, while at the same time wisely sidestepping any honest psychological examination of the troubled shooters.

Whatever disdain hurled at Run Hide Fight from the predictable places should be taken with the tiniest grain of salt imaginable, because their beef is not with the movie. It’s with themselves, and their inability to reconcile with the existence of a culture separate from their own. This is a good film, capturing a disturbing subject matter tastefully, with the right notes of cinematic liberty and reality. It is consistently exciting and never gratuitous. It’s a delicate balance, but Kyle Rankin threads the needle admirably. The violence is shocking, but not exploitative; after the early assault, most of the intense innocent bloodshed gives way to an effectively standard action/thriller plot. The camera captures shadows and silhouettes, fireballs in the distance and bodies often out of focus, in the dark. To say this sort of movie shouldn’t exist because of the horrible things it mirrors from real life, allow me to point you to literally hundreds of movies in just about every genre dealing with real tragedy and real heartbreak.

Sometimes, that’s where the best stories are told.

Schumacher lost his year-long battle with cancer on Monday, and sometimes it takes the tragedy of death for people to realize truths that were evident all along. He made some classics. Sure, Schumacher had more stinkers than just about anyone, but in death who really cares about The Number 23 or Bad Company; when you heard of his passing, the movies you thought of immediately are the ones that will stick. Joel Schumacher seized his moment like nobody else, and the movies that became commonplace through my youth and in my adolescence are the ones that flooded my mind when I read the tragic news.

Here are five essentials in order of their release, because ranking them is meaningless.

The Lost Boys (1987) – Originally, The Lost Boys was much more of a Goonies ripoff. Richard Donner’s kid-centric adventure was a big hit in 1985, and Jan Fischer and James Jeremias’s story for The Lost Boys was going to have fifth-grade vampires square off against 8-year old Frog Brothers. Schumacher, thankfully, wanted no part of that.

It was Joel Schumacher who wanted the vampires to be teenagers and the Frog Brothers to be older. He knew it would make the story more alluring, more sexually charged if it’s about a bunch of hormonal-aged teens. Schumacher cast Kiefer Sutherland, Jason Patric, and all the perfect faces up and down the boardwalk. Despite capturing the hyper-specific fading punk aesthetic as it was giving way to the hair metal of 1987, there is still a timelessness and an unshakable energy to The Lost Boys. It’s arguably the greatest “modern” vampire film, a lean, gorgeous, garish entertainment, brilliantly distilled down to its lurid core.

Flatliners (1990) – Five medical students meeting in the cover of night to cheat death for a glimpse at the afterlife, only to grow obsessed with the looks they get, and suffer mental, emotional, and sometimes physical consequences. Now, add three matinee idols, a young Baldwin brother, and a brilliant character actor into the five roles, and you have the ingredients for a robust blockbuster thriller.

Flatliners was a $61 million hit, mostly because it was loaded with young stars every teenager wanted to see, especially in an R-rated thriller. The tension holds up in repeat viewings, and the bizarre directions the story ultimately goes gives the whole film a dangerous, unpredictable vibe. Julia Robert and Kiefer Sutherland became an item during production, and the chemistry and energy is palpable on screen. Much like The Lost Boys, Flatliners showcased Schumacher’s ability to find the right young stars and put them in the proper place.

Falling Down (1993) – For my money, this is Schumacher’s masterpiece. The story of white male rage is a showcase for an uptight, downtrodden Michael Douglas, perfect in a flattop and short-sleeved dress shirt and tie, a relic of the 50s. It was a different direction for Douglas at the time, who had become cinematic shorthand for master-of-the-universe yuppies on film. Here, he is anything but, and Falling Down is one of his best performances.

It’s also a change of pace for Schumacher. The Lost Boys and Flatliners have obvious parallels, but here he applies a different aesthetic. He also benefits greatly from having Douglas’s sad-sack everyman square off against Robert Duvall in one of his sweetest, most sympathetic roles as a cop on his last day on the job. Falling Down is endlessly entertaining, shocking, sad, and certainly offensive to some in 2020. Who cares about those people though? This movie is great.

Batman Forever (1995) – I was there in 1995. I was 14, square in the demographic. I had the McDonald’s cups, I had the soundtrack, I had tickets for opening day. While Batman Forever might not hold up outside of the 90s, it deserves to be seen as a timestamp of the era. This is perhaps the most 90s movie in existence, a hyperactive, hyper-neon odyssey full of operatic performances smack dab in the center of the middle of the decade, in summer movie season. And, despite Val Kilmer being mostly asleep during the film, he works as the stodgy Bats. Schumacher is clearly interested in his character the least, which is fine.

This is Schumacher stamping his aesthetic on the iconic character with the biggest, loudest, most garish stamp he can find, and in that regard it should be preserved and celebrated.

A Time to Kill (1996) – I debated this final entry. I thought about Tigerland or Phone Booth, both terrific Colin Farrell collaborations. But Joel Schumacher’s era was the 90s, and there was no bigger money machine franchise in the 90s than the never-ending catalogue of legal thriller novelist John Grisham. So many iconic directors tried their hand at Grisham material – Coppola, Pollock, Altman. Schumacher made two, this and The Client; he hit a home run here, and he made Matthew McConaughey a star.

McConaughey had been in a few things, but hardly anyone knew about Dazed and Confused when A Time to Kill became one of the biggest hits of 1996. The chemistry between he and Sandra Bullock, herself at the peak of her superstardom in 1996, is still dynamic. Schumacher handles the delicate material with grace, and if any of his films ever deserved consideration for awards season, this was the one.

Sure, there are films that never see the light of day; there are B-movies and schlock and midnight movies that most audiences never know exist; that’s not for this space. To be forgotten, the film must have been known, at least to a certain degree. It had expectations that were never met. Big stars, competent marketing, a promising young director, a legendary auteur… these were the films given their moment in the multiplexes, and for whatever reason seemed to disappear from the collective consciousness. 

And, most important of all, these are great films we should no longer overlook.

In the early 80s, the already-great-and-powerful Steven Spielberg watched a short film, Proof, from a USC student named Kevin Reynolds. Spielberg was impressed by the young filmmaker and so moved by what he saw that he offered to step up and finance a feature-film adaptation. Proof was merely an extended sky-diving sequence with a group of college buddies, inspired by stories from Kevin Reynolds’ own life. Reynolds took that skydiving sequence and built an expansive adventure story, and an emotionally engaging coming-of-age fable, around it on all sides. Characters were added and the underlying message was given timely, emotional resonance. The title was changed from Proof to Fandango, and thus the tumultuous filmmaking career of Kevin Reynolds was officially underway.

An aspiring actor named Kevin Costner was still looking for his breakthrough in the early 80s when he auditioned for Proof. The California native had seemingly caught his big break in 1983 when he nabbed the crucial role of Alex in Lawrence Kasdan’s boomer blockbuster, The Big Chill. Alex was a friend whose suicide is the catalyst for the entire story, where college friends reunite and reignite their lives. In the end, however, all the flashback scenes featuring Costner’s part were cut from the film; Kasdan was apologetic, and promised Costner a plum role in his next film.

Meanwhile, Costner auditioned for Proof, but Reynolds passed. Now the film was a major studio production, however, and it needed handsome young actors; Costner made perfect sense as Gardner Barnes, the de facto leader of this particular group of rabble rousing college grads. In the early days, before the weight of ego and the cynicism of the industry seemed to break Kevin Costner’s spirit, he was a wiry, energetic, fast-moving performer, and his energy is what gives Fandango a heartbeat.

Fandango drops us off in the middle of graduation night, 1971, at the University of Texas. Gardner Barnes and his band of merry men have just graduated and are celebrating at their ramshackle fraternity house (every set in the film is art directed to the hilt, heightened to give the film a sense of boundlessness). It’s the last day of their youth. Gardner’s received his draft papers for Vietnam; so has his best friend, Kenneth, played by Sam Robards. Kenneth is also engaged to wed in mere days, but his draft duty upends everything. He decides to escape his upcoming nuptials and head to the Texas/Mexico border with Gardner to, as it’s obliquely explained, “dig up Dom.”

Gardner and Kenneth hit the road, trying to fend off fate, with two more in tow: a hulking, helpful, almost silent bookworm, Dorman (Chuck Bush), and a rich friend they don’t really like named Phillip, played by Judd Nelson. Phillip is going to Vietnam as well, but he has money and he has connections, so he will be fine; he’s on the outside of this group looking in, and he doesn’t help things with his incessant bitching. The quartet heads south, fast and furious in Phil’s teal 1959 Cadillac, and the bulk of Fandango centers on three crucial set pieces along the road to the border.

The first setup involves a train and the aforementioned teal Caddy, and it’s an early indication that Kevin Reynolds could direct terrific action and build suspense. The entire sequence is buzzing with tension, and the release at the end is absolute gold. The second sequence is from the source film, a wild skydiving set with dozens of moving parts that, again, is never confusing and never disengaging. It’s remarkable how Reynolds keeps all the plates in the air for an action set piece that runs upwards of fifteen minutes of screen time.

The denouement is a wedding, and I won’t say where or with whom, but after being run through an impressive gauntlet of youthful adventures, the peaceful celebration that springs up through the help of the local community is a charming payoff. Along the way, Reynolds builds on emotions and pulls us into the immediacy of the mission, and the reason for its existence. And still, there are times where Reynolds allows the film to breathe, for Kenneth to lament his decision to abandon his wedding, and for he and Gardner to think long and hard about the fork in the road that’s inching ever closer.

Fandango is unwieldy and sometimes sloppy, but it’s the coming-of-age film almost every young filmmaker has to get out of their system. As Gardner tells the uptight Phillip, sometimes you have to skirt responsibility until the last moment, because one day you will be old, and regret will be the only emotion you’ll feel. “There’s nothing wrong with going nowhere,” Gardner says, “It’s a privilege of youth.” It’s all about nostalgia, and a longing for the careless nature of being 19, 20 years-old… and how fleeting these years ultimately are. It’s an emotion with which anyone can identify, and despite it’s outlandish reaches, the universality of these kids and the way life changes once college ends transcends generations.

Steven Spielberg didn’t like the movie. He disliked it enough, in fact, to remove his name from the credits, one of many sabotages and misfortunes which Kevin Reynolds would endure over his career. Fandango was dropped in theaters in January of 1985, and nobody went to see it. That summer, Lawrence Kasdan made good on his promise with Costner and gave him a central role in his western, Silverado. It was a hit, and Costner was off and running, but for my money Fandango is more of an indicator as to the type of carefree detachment Kevin Costner would employ in his great early roles.

Six years after Fandango, Reynolds and Costner would team up once again for Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, a messy and bizarre adventure that raked in the dough in the summer of 1991. It also planted the seeds of dissent between Reynolds and Costner, whose ego was beginning to get the better of him in the years after his big Dances with Wolves Oscar night. That ego completely sabotaged the duo’s next film, Waterworld, an infamous disaster that ended Reynolds and Costner’s relationship for almost 20 years; the two finally buried the hatchet and reunited for the 2012 TV miniseries Hatfields and McCoys.

Fandango may lose points for some in its willingness to go beyond what could be perceived reality, or realistic expectations, or realism regarding the situations with which these characters find themselves. That’s the point. This is a weekend foray, once more into the breach for young men with uncertain futures, men who may never see each other again for the rest of their lives, men whose lives may not last much longer, and it’s Kevin Reynolds throwing everything at the wall. He’s mixing memories with music and adventure, the carefree energy of youthful endeavors, and by the time the end credits roll and Blind Faith begins singing “Can’t Find My Way Home,” I could feel this movie deep down in my heart. That’s rare.

Fandango is my favorite discovery of 2020, and Steven Spielberg has never been more wrong.

And through it all, Travolta was always charming, always funny, all the while totally undercutting these anachronistic notions of masculinity and coming through on the other side as a new version of a man, smarter and stronger. And in 1980, he took that same vibe to the south, to Houston, Texas, and to a legendary honky-tonk nightclub. He attacks the faults of his own iconography head on in Urban Cowboy, which never received quite the same broad fanfare of Saturday Night Fever or Grease. In many ways, though, it’s the best of the three.

Or maybe I’m just too close to Urban Cowboy, but I don’t think so. The people in director James Bridges’ smoky brown melodrama resemble the photos of my own parents in the years before I was born (Urban Cowboy is a year older than I am). The pearl snap shirts and feathered cowboy hats were in my dad’s closet, and the songs of Charlie Daniels and Johnny Lee colored my youth. And yes, my parents loved this movie because they identified; one of my earliest movie memories is standing my parents’ living room seeing John Travolta, hungover and beat up, dangling from scaffolding.

My parents never split up and got entangled with an ex-con prison rodeo psychopath in a mesh shirt, mind you, but this world was alive for me as I grew up. And those ne’er do wells were always on the periphery back in those days in Texas. My closeness does create bias, but it also gives me an advantage over someone from the Northeast digesting the material in this movie, just as the people who grew up in Brooklyn in 1977 better understand the world of Tony Manero. My experience growing up and seeing this world as it evolved over the 1980s allows me to vouch for the spot on authenticity, which the performances sell right from the start.

John Travolta’s Bud is a little older than Tony, or Danny Zuko in Grease. He’s ready to shed his youthful skin and be an adult. He doesn’t care about his hair, because it’s going to be under a cowboy hat. He yearns to be an authentic, hard-working cowboy, and that earnest desire is palpable in the early scenes as Bud leaves his modest family home and heads to Houston to work hard, and party hard. But he’s a little rough around the edges for this new brand of urban wrangler; he’s from the country and only tagging along with his uncle the first time he visits Gilley’s Honky Tonk and sees the world he wants to infiltrate. That’s where he meets Sissy.

Debra Winger was just becoming a star in 1980. She was 25, and she still had An Officer and a Gentleman and Terms of Endearment in her future, but all that fire and sexual energy was alive and well in Urban Cowboy. Winger is an equal with Travolta, and Sissy is just as eager to please and just as uncertain how to actually be an adult. She makes mistakes, they both make mistakes, but we know almost immediately from their steamy first dance montage, that they will end up together in the end. That isn’t the draw of the movie, it’s the characters and the world of wannabe cowboys crossing paths with something beyond their fun moonlighting at Gilley’s, someone dangerous like Scott Glenn’s reptilian villain, Wes Hightower.

Glenn was just about out of Hollywood at the time. His ego had gotten him into fights with directors and executives, and he was ready to write it off when James Bridges called him and knew that if he played this character he would never have to audition for a role again. Everything about Wes is everything Bud is not; he’s confident and dangerous, and he can fight and he has a dark appeal that lures in young Sissy. Glenn’s Wes is a tremendous disruptor, and a monster, and Sissy learns these lessons the hard way.

Both Bud and Sissy lose each other to other affairs in the middle of the movie, and they both realize the grass is not, in fact, greener on the other side. Everything about their affairs eventually exposes itself to be a fraud, one more perilously than the other. Madolyn Smith Osborne’s socialite, Pam, is the high society comfort Bud thinks he wants, but he eventually realizes that high rise parties and silk sheets don’t have that authenticity he so eager sought when he first pulled into the big city. Urban Cowboy is the most honest portrayal of a relationship and how people have to grow and find common ground while not forcing change on the other person, and in that regard, it is as authentic as the world Bud seeks.

Beyond the story of the film is the rich atmosphere of Gilley’s, a rowdy honky tonk bar started by Mickey Gilley and club promoter Sherwood Cryer in 1970. For a decade, Gilley’s reputation grew, and the country western music and dance scene was slowly crawling across parts of America. Hollywood knew this world was ripe for a story, and the hype surrounding Urban Cowboy carried it to a sizable $46 million box office. The film itself never received the praise of Saturday Night Fever or Grease, but it deserves to stand shoulder to shoulder with Travolta’s disco nightclub odyssey.

And it’s certainly better than Grease.

That last statement felt hyperbolic at first, but I’ve thought about it and I don’t think it is. Tenet could realistically be the bridge between our current stasis as a “moviegoing” society, and a return to a normalcy as we ascend the stairs, step by step, to get back to our lives. And for some of us out there, “our lives” includes the freedom to escape to a dark theater for a couple of hours. Theaters, which were already struggling, have a chance to save themselves here, and Nolan’s film would be a perfect test of the new functionality of a theater. Set for a July 17 release, Tenet should absolutely stay put.

Let’s start with the undeniable truth behind all of this… Tenet looks incredible. Ten years after Inception, Christopher Nolan is back in his own head with another labyrinthine epic, this time with John David Washington and Robert Pattinson playing… someone? There are no character names on the imdb page, and the synopsis is just as bewildering as the trailer. This is an event film, just as every Nolan film has been since 2005, and it’s the perfect way for theaters to responsibly open their doors.

I haven’t been interested in the quarantine, or the impact of COVID on “the culture,” or whatever. No thanks. I am interested, however, in returning to a version of the normal world fairy soon. Most of us are interested in this, excluding the Extremely Online crowd. And there is a way for theaters to coordinate and open en masse with Tenet. Implementing new safety measures, enforcing social distancing, requiring masks in the lobby, hand sanitizer stations – you know the list, the one where responsible action is taken to begin functioning as a society once again – can all be put in place in theaters across the planet. Then, auditorium capacity is reduced to 50%, maybe even 40, and on the weekend of July 17 Tenet opens on every screen.

Think about a normal day at a movie theater, even in the summer; almost all of the auditoriums are under 50% capacity because of normal diminishing traffic for movies in week 3, 4, 5 of their release. With one highly-anticipated movie to show, the screen would likely be no more full or scant than they would on a normal day. It could work, and it might fail, but it’s better than nothing. If theaters see success in these first couple of weeks after this new “soft” opening, then more new movies can begin to schedule their releases, and gradually we go back to the world as we knew it. This all depends, of course, on whether or not society is on board.

Personally, I think we are.

Since the pandemic has become a stupid political game in just under six months, it’s difficult to weed through the nonsense and think rationally about the statistics that generally paint a more optimistic picture, like the recent data from the CDC that suggests the mortality rate is .05%. There has been bad news, and death, and panic, and everything was really weird for two months or so, no doubt. And we should all continue to be vigilant and respectful. But now the gears of society are grinding again, all over the world, and progress is being made every day towards treatments and vaccines and a general realization that this thing doesn’t spread as fast and furious as once thought. Now, surfaces aren’t a threat. I don’t really want to stir a debate on the state of the pandemic because, yes, it’s stupid and political now, and I don’t like bringing all that junk into this space that I cherish. But this is a big crossover moment between the two topics, and I’m confident there is a way through this to the other side.

The motto cannot be to stay locked in your homes forever, or venture out and everyone’s parents and grandparents will perish by the millions. It is simply no longer the rational conclusion to re-opening. Things are improving, unless you get your information from a tainted source that wants things to be worse; besides, who knows what sort of knowledge and information we have at our disposal in six more weeks. Think about where we were, collectively, six weeks ago, then the six weeks before that. It isn’t just boredom ending the pandemic, its information and CDC updates, and in another six weeks there will likely be even better progress and more information about COVID-19. The desire to stay locked down, to write an open letter to Christopher Nolan begging him to not release his movie because it will cause mass death and disease, simply doesn’t feel like reality anymore.

Let us not forget the precursor to the potential Nolan rescue project, and that is the grimy Russell Crowe Hitcher riff, Unhinged, which some theaters are tentatively planning for a July 1 release. Now, Unhinged is borderline VOD already, a delightfully trashy-looking bag of junk food that I would have no problem seeing in July, but it’s not the sort of litmus test theaters need for the state of their business moving forward. They need a big tentpole to test the waters.

If you don’t think it’s safe, don’t go out. But don’t shame people for being responsible and living their lives, given the new information we receive daily. There have been polls that seem to indicate nobody will go back to the theaters if they opened now, but those polls likely aren’t focused on the right groups. Don’t just ask the general public – most of them weren’t going anyway – ask members of a movie discount club through a chain, or die-hard fans of local theaters, if they want to return, and you will certainly get a different number. If Tenet holds strong, it could reap the benefits of being the only show in town; it will also (likely) benefit from being a terrific thriller that captures audience imagination. Chris Nolan has redefined the cinematic experience before, we just need him to do it now more than ever.

I’ll buy a ticket.