Writing about movies starring old white guys that I watched on airplanes might become a regular thing. Here are some thoughts on two pretty good older films that I only watched last week because I was on a long flight and my options were limited.
"Space Cowboys" is the Clint Eastwood astronaut movie, which he directed and also starred in, alongside Tommy Lee Jones, Donald Sutherland, and James Garner. He was just turning seventy at the time of its release in the year 2000, and was still every inch the movie star that he'd been for the three preceding decades. You'll recognize the "getting the band back together" plot immediately, this time giving a team of elderly air force pilots who trained to be astronauts in the '50s a chance to finally make it into space in the present day when an old Soviet satellite needs repairs. Eastwood's character, Frank, is the only one with the knowhow to fix it, so he uses that as leverage to get his whole team on the mission.
NASA enthusiasts will enjoy the chance to see the Johnson and Kennedy Space Centers as they existed twenty-five years ago, along with all the usual training hijinks and spiffy launch sequences. However, the film's pleasures are really the performances - watching Tommy Lee Jones and Clint Eastwood spar, and James Garner and Donald Sutherland providing some welcome comic relief. Jones even gets a decent romance with the team's mission director, played by Marcia Gay Holland. The plot is very predictable - there are clashes with other astronaut hopefuls, tense negotiations with the top brass at NASA, and of course the Russians aren't telling them everything, but the execution is solid the whole way through. Well, the decision to have the younger versions of the leads dubbed by the older actors is a little wacky, but otherwise I thought Eastwood did a fine job. I appreciated seeing a movie about a space mission where nearly all the effects are practical, and it really is a treat to see these actors still in their prime.
Onwards to "Analyze This," which is one of those movies that I thought I'd watched at some point, but really only remember from the endless clips and promos that I saw for it. Released a few weeks into the first season of "The Sopranos," "Analyze This" starts with the same premise of a mob boss, Paul Vitti (Robert DeNiro), who finds himself in need of psychiatric help. One thing leads to another, and he finds Dr. Ben Sobel (Billy Crystal), a bored psychiatrist who is about to get married to a nice woman named Laura (Lisa Kudrow). After some very aggressive persuasion, Vitti becomes Dr. Sobel's patient, and Sobel finds his private life getting more and more mixed up with the mob.
I think it's fair to call "Analyze This" the last really successful film that Harold Ramis directed, and the last big hit that Billy Crystal had as a leading man. It feels like a film from a totally different time now, a big studio comedy with the resources to pull off some pretty decent set pieces, like the opening raid on a mob meetup that makes good use of farm equipment and lots of extras. Robert DeNiro and Billy Crystal pair very well, and I was surprised that Paul Vitti has such an air of menace around him. He's funny and endearing, but also absolutely convincing as a dangerous murderer who immediately introduces tension into every scene he invades. So much of the laughter here is of the nervous kind, as it's impossible to tell how a scene is going to play out with Vitti involved. DeNiro's performance is also terribly sweet, however, foreshadowing "Meet the Parents" and many more comedic roles to come.
And yet, my favorite performance belongs to Joe Viterelli, who plays Vitti's loyal henchman Jelly. Viterelli was a character actor who pretty much only played mobsters - the old fashioned kind in suits and ties who disappeared from popular culture right around the time the "Sopranos" got really popular. I regret that I haven't seen any other film where he's played a major role. Viterelli is so loveable and so memorable, and Jelly is a character who could only exist in movies like this - the type they sadly don't make anymore.
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