Grand Canyon (1991) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski) and Tuna

Roger Ebert gave it four stars, several people picked it on their top ten lists in 1991, and I saw it on a top ten list for the entire 1990's.

On the other hand, Leonard Maltin gave it two stars, and a lot of reviewers hated it. Maltin summed up the negative case by saying that it was mushy and superficial, and others said that it was too filled with coincidences.

It begins with Kevin Kline (Kasdan's permanent lead!) in the same position that begins "Bonfire of the Vanities". His car breaks down in a tough neighborhood, he calls for a tow, and they tell him - an hour! He's about to get his ass kicked or worse, when a guardian angel appears. Danny Glover pulls up with a tow truck, long before expected, and defuses the situation. As the movie progresses, several other people decide that they either must become guardian angels or that they need one. Kline's wife, for example, adopts a baby that she finds in the bushes. She knows that she must intervene in the baby's life, just as Glover intervened in her husband's.

Looking back on it, I think that Kasdan continued the story he has been telling all his life, the story of the baby boomer generation. Just as The Big Chill kind of summed up where the boomers were in the 80's, this film sort of summed up the new age spirituality that crept in in the 90's, when boomers started to despair about the condition of the world they had once hoped to remake, and turned inside themselves for answers.

If you want to be cynical, you could say "it is SO 90's". Or you could say it is no "Body Heat" or "The Big Chill". This seems to me like the same kind of criticism that led people to boo Bob Dylan when he used an electric guitar, or the Beatles when they gave up bubble gun rock. Hell, I like Kasdan's movies, and I don't expect him to keep remaking the same one. I reckon he'll keep growing and keeping us apprised of his generation's story.

TUNA IN YELLOW

I am afraid there is no point/counterpoint here between Scoopy and myself. I agree this is a brilliant film. The most amazing thing about it for me is that it holds my interest despite having essentially no plot, and no central conflict. It does have a lot of honesty, and manages to make me like nearly every character. One of the things that ties the collection of somewhat inter-related characters together is a central theme. I think Danny Glover as Simon summed it up when he said, "The bad shit is going to happen no matter what. If you are lucky, there will be some good stuff too."

The film is all about the importance of perspective, and the Grand Canyon is used to show that, from a broad perspective, we and our troubles are pretty small. I have to give this a solid B. Unless you hate this genre, you should see this film.

Yup, I like the movie. I don't think it's fair to do what Maltin did in his critique - to describe it in such a way that it gets lumped together with orchestrated mush like "Pay it Forward". It is not that. In fact, every time a character starts to spew some bullshit about changing his life or someone else's, the other characters tell him it's bullshit.

It used some very effective techniques to share the character's feelings with us, as opposed to simply showing us those feelings. The first scene, for example, managed to create tension very effectively with the slow camera work and the music. I was really feeling Kline's fear, and then sharing his subsequent sense that Glover had brought him back to life, and to see life more clearly than before.

Like "The Big Chill", the movie features a good ensemble cast, perhaps thinking more than we really think, perhaps telling the truth more directly that we usually tell it, but doing so in a way that becomes literary cinema and eventually glows with its own special light.