…And Harrison Ford

I’m indecently excited at the notion that Harrison Ford has finally stopped clinging on to his leading man career and belatedly embraced just being ‘…And Harrison Ford’.

Ford was 35 when recurring roles in the Lucas-Coppola-complex finally culminated in his star-making supporting turn as Han Solo in Star Wars. He threw himself into leading man roles with gusto honing that roguish quality for comedy, romance and action in Force 10 from Navarone, Hanover Street, and The Frisco Kid, before The Empire Strikes Back codified his blockbuster persona. Its immediate successors, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Blade Runner, showcased both his strengths and his versatility respectively. From that point on Ford balanced his Spielberg and Lucas blockbusters with more intimate films like Witness, Frantic and The Mosquito Coast, and even branched into outright comedy with Working Girl. The 1990s are when everything starts to wobble. He started well with a massive hit despite a terrible haircut in Presumed Innocent but followed it up with Regarding Henry, which, in retrospect, may be the tipping point.

Nobody wanted to see Ford in a quiet drama… He responded by belatedly taking on the role of Jack Ryan in Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger, but neither of those films is well beloved either. Indeed The Fugitive was his last unqualified mega-hit blockbuster. At 52 in Clear and Present Danger Ford was getting a bit old for the all-action shtick, which he last successfully purveyed without in-camera apology in 1997’s Air Force One. Branching out into comedy with Sabrina and Six Days Seven Nights proved disastrous, the controversial turkey The Devil’s Own didn’t help matters, and by 2000 he was clearly struggling. His terrifically ambiguous turn in Zemeckis’ Hitchcock homage What Lies Beneath was meant to resurrect his leading man cachet after the unseen disaster of Random Hearts. Instead it led only to the unseen K-19: The Widowmaker, and the unwatchable Hollywood Homicide and Firewall. These all got cinema releases, but they weren’t must-sees…

The gambit of a 4th Indiana Jones movie seemed liked desperation, and it was. Ford was still good in the role but its welcome success wasn’t enough to get his leading roles in either immigration drama Crossing Borders or medical drama Extraordinary Measures into Irish cinemas. Nearly three years after Indy 4 he finally made into Irish cinemas again with Morning Glory, a reasonably popular film, but one in which he appears in an ‘…And Harrison Ford’ capacity, in a part that functions as a satirical commentary on his long refusal to acknowledge his star had dimmed. I didn’t know Ford was even in Cowboys and Aliens until I saw the trailer before Transformers 3, but it’s great news. It means he’s accepted that he can’t be the lead in blockbusters anymore, but that instead of sulking about it he’s shrugged his shoulders in the best Indy ‘I’m making this up as I go along’ fashion and realised that he still belongs in blockbusters.

He may have to accept Daniel Craig as the lead, but an awful lot of fun can be had as the wise mentor to the action-hero whippersnapper in blockbusters. Ford has finally relented and become the Henry Jones who sits in the side-car, not the one who rides the motorbike, and that’s something to cheer.

‘Matt Damon is Not Jason Bourne’

Matt Damon is Not Jason Bourne. An obvious truth I know, but one which seems to need re-stating of late…

I’ve been bemused by more than a few posters for movies of late because of two problems, the second of which concerns Matt Damon. The first problem is ho-hum films with unmemorable titles which make matters worse for themselves by blowing up their equally generic taglines to the same size so that looking at the poster on a bus stop you can find yourself looking at the top and bottom of the poster, and wondering if that new rom-com with Vince Vaughn is actually called The Truth Hurts or The Dilemma, or if Russell Brand is voicing a CGI character in something called Hop or Candy, Chicks, and Rocky and Roll. Now it’s undoubtedly true that good films make their titles memorable even if those titles aren’t particularly great objectively, but that’s no excuse for mediocre films settling for utterly banal titles. Similarly with taglines; how far we have fallen from when taglines like ‘In space no one can hear you scream’ became as famous as any lines of dialogue from the film they advertised.

This seems to display a lack of effort by all concerned that ties into my second problem – incredibly lazy journalism being utilised for incredibly lazy marketing. Green Zone displayed on its poster a quote stating ‘Bourne Goes Epic’. The Adjustment Bureau displayed on its poster a quote stating ‘Bourne meets Inception’. It’s got to the stage now that if Paul Thomas Anderson was to make a companion piece to Boogie Nights starring Matt Damon instead of his lookalike Mark Wahlberg, you would put serious money that some idiot somewhere would obligingly write ‘Bourne goes Porn’ as a handy pull-quote for the poster. Matt Damon is Not Jason Bourne: not every film he makes will be a gritty hand-held action thriller, nor will he be taciturn and amnesiac in every role he plays. Could Hereafter be accurately described as ‘Bourne meets Medium’? This trend is as idiotic as plastering the sentence ‘Indiana Jones meets Perry Mason’ on a poster for Presumed Innocent would have been, and it desperately needs to stop now.

The death of film was loudly declared some weeks ago in an article I may parse in the near future, but, while I don’t subscribe to the idea that Hollywood doesn’t tell stories anymore, I do think it may be accurate to suggest that a malaise of sorts has indeed descended over Burbank. Possibly it’s related to the decline in DVD sales, and a consequent feeling that if everything will just be pirated and watched online for free anyway, then what’s the point of wasting your time designing a Saul Bass class poster with a tagline that will become a catchphrase to entice people to see a film in theatres, when you could just plaster a barely adequate tagline and an inane quote from a pressed for time journalist over a cast photo?