Ladder 49
(Posted on behalf of someone who, apparently, has better things to do than sign up to post things herself.)
I ended up watching this in a Friday afternoon showing at a shopping mall near Tampa, the place where America keeps all its shorts-clad old people. And the movie was made for just that demographic, steeped as it is in an old-fashioned culture of macho heroism, in which men save lives and women go grocery shopping and turn out babies on a regular basis. The story is this: firefighter risks his life in a fire, judging that the good of saving lives outweighs the worry and potential loss to which he‚s subjecting his family. Take that and repeat six or seven times, and you've got your movie. That's it.
None of the characters change or demonstrate any complexity, the plot doesn't crescendo or keep you in suspense. In fact, the most visually striking scene, the one you see in the trailers of the 20-story building blazing away in the night, is the first scene of the movie. It's The Big Fire, the one in which our protagonist eventually dies, but not before he has an interminable series of flashbacks about his life as a firefighter. I hope the wife got a good widow's pension, because I don't think she'd be able to raise those two little kids on her pre-marriage job as an assistant jewelry maker.
I ended up watching this in a Friday afternoon showing at a shopping mall near Tampa, the place where America keeps all its shorts-clad old people. And the movie was made for just that demographic, steeped as it is in an old-fashioned culture of macho heroism, in which men save lives and women go grocery shopping and turn out babies on a regular basis. The story is this: firefighter risks his life in a fire, judging that the good of saving lives outweighs the worry and potential loss to which he‚s subjecting his family. Take that and repeat six or seven times, and you've got your movie. That's it.
None of the characters change or demonstrate any complexity, the plot doesn't crescendo or keep you in suspense. In fact, the most visually striking scene, the one you see in the trailers of the 20-story building blazing away in the night, is the first scene of the movie. It's The Big Fire, the one in which our protagonist eventually dies, but not before he has an interminable series of flashbacks about his life as a firefighter. I hope the wife got a good widow's pension, because I don't think she'd be able to raise those two little kids on her pre-marriage job as an assistant jewelry maker.
posted by Ambivalent_Maybe at 9:04 AM
1 Comments:
i think you have forever bound the image of burning buildings with varicose veins in my tiny little brain. thank you lazy blogger.
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