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COPYRIGHT 2006 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
If you were out of the country, or out of your mind, for the past year, you may wish to know what you missed. One glance at the titles of the most admired films, and you will wonder what the hell was going on. "Brokeback Mountain," "Broken Flowers," "Crash": that's an awful lot of breakage. Yes, you might say, but those are fancy pictures. How about the rugged weekend viewers, hauling their good sense to the multiplex? What did they pay to watch? "Wedding Crashers." Ouch.
There is nothing new, of course, in the promise of fracture. Whether you crash a wedding or an Imperial Starcruiser, movies are the place to do it. This year will mark the seventieth anniversary of "San Francisco," in which Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy keep body and soul together in the jetsam of an earthquake. After the literal wreckage of 2005, which began with the aftershock of an undersea quake, and whose litany of the homeless stretched from New Orleans to Kashmir, cinematic fantasies of disaster feel more flippant than ever. Yet "San Francisco" is an exercise in American stoicism, and the wryness and proficiency with which its characters respond to chaos remain a defensible dream. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, amid the finger-pointing, lay a tempting thought: If only Spencer Tracy had been in charge.
No wonder Hollywood has turned to old John Carpenter films. He was one of the last directors...
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