Best action flicks of the 90s

Do you think the nineties was the best decade for action movies in recent years? While I’m not sure about my own answer, I can confidently say that Speed tops my list and worms its way into Tuesday’s Overlooked Films at Todd Mason’s blog Sweet Freedom.

I missed forgotten books last Friday. My proposed review of a short vintage mystery, announced with fanfare in the previous post, will have to wait. I read the ebook but I have not had the time to write about it. Before I do, however, I'll have to once again go through the book, to sift through the various characters and figure out who is who, make sense of the subplots, and see how I can refer to a particular dialect. Was the book confusing or was it my lack of understanding? The latter, no doubt.

In the past, mystery novels have left me baffled. I've had to reread certain portions to clear my doubts. It is easy to go back in a book, not so in an ebook, especially if you're reading on a tablet where you tap page after page and get nowhere. The “search” option is no patch on turning back pages in an actual book. Besides, you can’t take down notes while reading on a tab; after a while your fingers hurt and you experience mild arthritic symptoms!

With no book review in immediate sight, I thought of writing about some of my most preferred action movies. Here is how this post came about.

Saturday evening, as I returned home by a near-empty suburban train, I overheard two fellow commuters discuss action films and one of them observed that the nineties was the best decade for action movies in recent times. While it was a matter of opinion, my fellow passenger had a point. They mentioned a few movies based on which I drew up my own list but didn't get very far as I wasn't sure if the films were made in the nineties.

Later, after cross-checking on the internet, I found that I was right. My random list of action films across genres included Terminator 2: Judgement Day, Die Hard 2 and Die Hard with a Vengeance, Con Air, Executive Decision, Speed, The Fugitive, Mission: Impossible, True Lies, Face/Off, The Rock, Independence Day, The Matrix, and Air Force One. I liked all of these though I'd reservations about Face/Off.

I’m aware that I've left out several good movies, like Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs; I have not seen either and I'm not sure they fit into the “action” mould. Or even sf comedy Men in Black for that matter.

Choosing my best action film of the nineties wasn’t easy. After much thought I narrowed down the fourteen movies to six: Terminator 2, Executive Decision, Speed, The Rock, Independence Day, and Air Force One. I have seen each of these films more than once and every one of them is a slavish entertainer.

The action in The Rock is thrilling from the time Sean Connery takes a clueless FBI on a reckless and destructive chase in a Humvee, through San Francisco, to the secret mission Connery and Nicholas Cage undertake on Alcatraz Island. The dialogues are good, particularly the biting humour between Connery and Cage. Rogue army men Ed Harris and David Morse, holed up inside the former military prison, are the bad guys who actually play the good guys. Harris and Morse, two fine and amiable actors.

There are similarities between Executive Decision and Air Force One. Both are hijack dramas and both Kurt Russell and Harrison Ford have a distinctive on-screen presence. Russell must share honours with David Suchet, John Leguizamo, Halle Berry, and Oliver Platt in what I thought was a cohesive cast in a well-integrated plot. Ford, who has perfected the grimace, has more at stake—it’s his film, it’s his plane, and he has a right to order terrorist Ivan Korshunov (Gary Oldman) to get off the flying White House in midair.

Air Force One and Independence Day must be two of the most jingoistic films ever made. “Liberty 24 is changing call sign. Liberty 24 is now Air Force One!” and all that grandstanding. People love these films. They want their presidents and prime ministers to be like James Marshall and Thomas J. Whitmore. Celluloid icons come alive.

Predictably, a lot of people liked Arnold Schwarzenegger as the villainous cyborg in The Terminator. Arnie in a negative role? Not for me. I prefer him as the good guy, including in the sequel Terminator 2: Judgement Day. Anyone, even a deadpan bionic man, who throws a security blanket around you with the assuring line “Come with me if you want to live” must mean well.

That leaves us with Speed which I decided was my first choice for the best action movie of the nineties. I liked everything about it: it is an ordinary film with a tightly woven script; it has nonstop action and suspense; it has a good cast—a grim-faced Keanu Reeves, the endearing Sandra Bullock, the "multi-talented" Dennis Hopper, the affable Jeff Daniels, and a pleasant-looking Joe Morton; it has a fairly believable storyline—a speeding bus filled with regular people and a bomb that'll go off should it slow down or stop; it has a daredevil cop and a spunky gal to save everyone’s day; it has funny lines; it has romance, friendship, and vengeance; and it has a half-crazed villain with a sardonic humour. 

Speed, directed by Jan de Bont, whose portfolio as cinematographer is more impressive, is a busload of nerves and hypertension, and good fun all around.

Which action films of the nineties didn't make it here?

Musings on May Day

Today is May 1, a public holiday, in celebration of May Day, Labour Day or International Workers’ Day. It has a special significance for India and especially for the western state of Maharashtra of which Mumbai (then Bombay) is the capital. On this day, in 1960, a little over a hundred people sacrificed their lives during protests for the formation of a separate Marathi-speaking state of Maharashtra with Mumbai as its capital. Marathi is the official language of the state and one of the twenty-three official languages of India. For this reason May 1 is also celebrated as Maharashtra Day. “Maha” means great, “Rashtra” means “nation” or “land,” hence great nation.

The formation of the state was part of the reorganisation of states under Nehru, independent India’s first prime minister after the British left. Maharashtra is the second most populous and third largest state as well as the richest, a distinction it owes to Mumbai which is the financial, industrial, commercial, and entertainment capital of the country. The city of everyone’s dreams, and not a few nightmares, pays maximum taxes to the central, or federal, government. In return for its generosity, Mumbai gets back very little, as evident from its poor infrastructure. But things have been improving, gradually, since the turn of the century. We have a new cable-stay sea bridge linking the old city and the suburbs—our very own Golden Gate, the country’s first monorail system, and a four-line metro rail of which Line 1 has been in the making for a few years now. It cuts right through my suburb. I won't be taking it as my commute to and from work is perpendicular.

I was born in Bombay and live in Mumbai, which is the same thing, and I thought I should tell you something about my city.

Meanwhile, this and next week I've lined up a few reviews of books and short stories I finished reading by April 30. Immediately coming up is a review of a vintage mystery, a short fiction, for forgotten books at Patti’s blog, Friday. I hope I do justice to it as I couldn't get used to the lingo spoken by one of the characters.

Posting from home has become a bit of a problem since I got rid of our desktop PC a couple of years ago. I’m not comfortable with a laptop. I can use it to surf and read, download books, comment on blogs, check emails, book tickets, and that sort of thing. What I can’t do as well as I can on a regular computer is type out a lengthy post or an article with two fingers (as I do) and scroll (with my forefinger). I still need the keyboard and mouse. So now I keep the laptop a little distance away, the keyboard right in front of me, and the mouse on my right—the desktop-laptop has made things easier.

Reading Habits #9: Do you surprise your readers?

© Prashant C. Trikannad

On my blog I seldom review books I write about before I read them, because they lose their novelty irrespective of what I may have to say about them later. There is no surprise element. A reader or visitor knows what to possibly expect, not that public memory is long. Still, I like reading books and short stories that most people might have forgotten about or might not have been aware of. Those are the ones I like reviewing too. My reviews of Public Murders, a crime fiction by Bill Granger, and short stories by Fanny Stevenson, wife of Robert Louis Stevenson, and John Philip Sousa, a renowned presidential musician, created a mild but welcome ripple.

Last week, I picked up three used paperbacks in good condition—Early Autumn by Robert B. Parker, who, according to The Boston Globe, has taken his place beside Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald; The House That Jack Built, a Matthew Hope mystery, by Ed McBain; and Cast a Long Shadow, a Bandolero western, by Wayne D. Overholser. The McBain novel is No.13 in my collection; I haven't read the other twelve yet. While I’m familiar with McBain and Overholser, having read their novels previously, I have not read anything by Parker, the noted American crime fiction writer who created Detective Spenser. I’m looking forward to it. I'll be reading these novels but I won't be reviewing them.

Hiking or trekking, we walk off the beaten track; I apply the same principle to reading and reviewing. How about you?

Three short works by John Philip Sousa

Delightful tales from the musical pen of a composer and writer for Friday’s Forgotten Books at Patti Abbott’s blog Pattinase.

“That,” said Mephistopheles, solemnly, and with no pretense of sophistry, “is the string of death, and he who plays upon it dies at once.”

The plan was to review American music composer and conductor John Philip Sousa’s The Fifth String (1902), a novella about Angelo Diotti, a fictionally renowned Italian violinist who comes to America and falls in love with Mildred Wallace, the coldhearted daughter of a wealthy banker. 

At the heart of the story is Diotti’s possession of a unique and magnificent violin gifted to him by Satan. Unlike a typical violin which has four strings, this one has a fifth string. The four strings, when played, arouse feelings of pity, hope, love, and joy in the listener, and the fifth string, while also enchanting the listener, will mean death to the player. 

The question is does Signor Diotti play the death string?

The conversation between the composer and the devil is lively, and there is humour in the narrative. However, since I’ve only just started reading the fifty-five page ebook, I cannot offer a full review of this unusual tale.

I also read two other works by John Philip Sousa—The Conspirators, a short story about the abduction of a young girl, and Experiences of a Bandmaster, a short biographical sketch of the music composer. 

The author in 1900.
© Elmer Chickering
Wikimedia Commons

In The Conspirators, three “scoundrels,”—Dennis Foley and his son Tom, and their accomplice Hildey, kidnap little Lillian and hold her hostage in a shack near Beaver Dam, an isolated creek, and demand ten thousand dollars in ransom from her wealthy father, Colonel Franklin. What follows is a Hardy Boys-like search and rescue of the girl by her brother Gilbert and their friends Sandy, Dink, and Leander, and some tense moments in a boat chase across the river. The action and excitement in The Conspirators is mild compared to a Hardy Boys adventure.

In Experiences of a Bandmaster, Sousa relives some of his memorable experiences as a music conductor in the service of the United States and that of the general public. As a conductor of the Marine Band, he played at state functions in the White House, under Presidents Rutherford B. Hayes, James A. Garfield, Chester A. Arthur, Grover Cleveland, and Benjamin Harrison in that order.

I think I may say that more than one President, relieved from the onerous duties of a great reception, has found rest by sitting quietly in the corner of a convenient room and listening to the music.

In one anecdote, Sousa recounts his embarrassment when President Arthur approached him quietly and asked him to play the Cachuca, a Spanish solo dance music. When the composer explained that the Marine Band did not have the music, the President, it seems, looked surprised and remarked: “Why, Sousa, I thought you could play anything. I'm sure you can; now give us the Cachuca.” The brief sketch has many such anecdotes.

John Philip Sousa had a distinguished music career and was known mainly for American military and patriotic marches, which earned him the title ‘The March King’ or the ‘American March King.’ He must have composed music as beautifully as he wrote his stories. The two stories and the memoir were certainly well written. You can read more about Sousa here.

How the West Was Written, Vol.1, by Ron Scheer

Author Ron Scheer

© Buddies in the Saddle

I was fourteen when my paternal uncle introduced me to my first western, Sudden, by British author Oliver Strange. He used to read the Corgi editions in a single sitting of two hours. By the time I finished reading the ten adventures of the lightning-quick Texas outlaw, and an additional five by compatriot Frederick H. Christian (writer Frederick Nolan), I was hooked to western fiction. 

I followed up the Sudden series with westerns by J.T Edson, Zane Grey, Max Brand, George G. Gilman's Edge, Wayne D. Overholser, Giles A. Lutz, and Louis L'Amour whose Flint remains one of my favourite novels in the category. 

Over the past three decades, I read many westerns by various authors. I read them without pattern or proper knowledge of the genre. It was only in the past few years, and especially after I started blogging, that I realised there was far more to westerns than gunfights, saloon brawls, and rustling. My understanding of the Wild West has been coming mainly from reading about early and historical frontier fiction on blogs published by veterans in the field, James Reasoner, Ed Gorman, Ron Scheer, and Richard S. Wheeler, among several illustrious writers. Their reviews and articles about western stories in particular and western fiction in general have enhanced my pleasure of reading both early and contemporary westerns.

My education in frontier fiction is set to get a boost when I read Ron Scheer's just-released How the West Was Written, Frontier Fiction, Vol.1, 1880-1906. The book—the first of a two-volume series on frontier fiction during 1880-1915—is published by Beat to a Pulp whose editor-publisher David Cranmer describes Ron as "the premier reviewer of Western literature." I couldn't agree more as I'm a lot wiser about the Wild West after reading his many in-depth reviews of western books and films. If you're a fan of westerns, then you should head over to his blog Buddies in the Saddle.

While the title tells you what the book is about, here is a brief description from the introduction:

This book began as a question about the origins of the cowboy western... how it grew from Owen Wister’s bestseller, The Virginian (1902), to Zane Grey’s first novels a decade later. A reading of frontier fiction from that period, however, soon reveals that the cowboy western was only one of many different kinds of stories being set in the West.

Besides novels about ranching and the cattle industry, writers wrote stories about railroads, mining, timber, the military, politics, women’s rights, temperance, law enforcement, engineering projects, homesteaders, detectives, preachers and, of course, Indians, all of it an outpouring between the years 1880–1915. That brief 35-year period extends from the Earp-Clanton gunfight in Tombstone, Arizona, to the start of the First World War.

The chapters of How the West Was Written tell a story of how the western frontier fed the imagination of writers, both men and women. It illustrates how the cowboy is only one small figure in a much larger fictional landscape. There are early frontier novels in which he is the central character, while in others he’s only a two-dimensional, tobacco-chewing caricature, or just an incidental part of the scenery.

A reading of this body of work reveals that the best-remembered novel from that period, The Virginian, is only one among many early western stories. And it was not the first. The western terrain was used to explore ideas already present in other popular fiction—ideas about character, women, romance, villainy, race, and so on. A modern reader of early western fiction discovers that Wister’s novel was part of a flood of creative output. He and, later, Zane Grey were just two of many writers using the frontier as a setting for telling the human story.

How the West Was Written promises to be the literary equivalent of the epic film How the West Was Won, 1962. The book is currently available as an ebook for Kindle and in paperback. Ron Scheer says there will be a second volume for the years 1907-1915.

Love Story, 1970

A short run through a popular film of the seventies for Overlooked Films at Todd Mason's blog Sweet Freedom.

Ryan O'Neal is probably best remembered for the soap opera Peyton Place. But when I think of his films I immediately think of Love Story (1970), based on Erich Segal's popular novel, and Irreconcilable Differences (1984) where a little girl takes her warring parents to court with the intention of divorcing them. I've seen little else. 

Love Story is both a love story and a family drama where Oliver Barrett IV (O'Neal), a Harvard Law student, risks the wrath of his wealthy and elitist father by falling in love with an ordinary but intelligent girl, Jenny (Ali MacGraw), and marrying her. But their love is doomed for reasons other than familial opposition. Directed by Arthur Hiller and written by Erich Segal, Love Story is a poignant tale of two mature adults whose love and friendship depends on complete honesty with each other. 

While the late Erich Segal wrote in a clean and simple style, he weaved emotional stories, playing on the sentiments of his many readers. I believe when Love Story was released people came out crying from cinema halls. His Man, Woman and Child (written in 1970, filmed in 1983) was no less sentimental as a married man and father of two daughters grapples with unexpected events after he learns that he has a son from another woman, the result of a past affair. He wrote lines that became popular like "Love means never having to say you're sorry" in Love Story and "Sheila is why I believe in marriage" in Man, Woman and Child. I never saw Oliver's Story (1979), the sequel to Love Story and also based on a Segal novel.

Love Story is a nice depressing little film. But whatever happened to Ali MacGraw?

A short break

I'm on a short holiday from Friday, April 18, through Sunday, April 20, during which time I'll not be posting anything. I'm leaving my laptop behind but I'll be reading other blogs on my cellphone and tablet, although I may not have the time to comment. On this trip I'll be reading a book and an ebook respectively—Stallion Gate by Martin Cruz Smith and The Education of a Pulp Writer & Other Stories by David Cranmer. David is the editor-publisher of Beat to a Pulp, a webzine that publishes short stories in many genres. I'll be with my family and giving us company in the hill station will be lots of birds, monkeys, and horses, and unfortunately people too. A happy Good Friday and Easter weekend to you all.