A Sign of the End Times?

As I said I would, I've been playing with my DVD collection today, getting some movies I have yet to see 'out of the way', so to speak. I finally got through Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West which was an amazing experience. As anyone who has seen it knows, there is very little dialogue over the course of the film's almost 3 hour running time, but what is said is classic. I don't think I'll ever forget Henry Fonda saying, "How can you trust a man who wears both a belt and suspenders. he can't even trust his own pants." Jason Robards also has a cracker of a line when Charles Bronson turns him in for the $5000 reward which went something like this:

Harmonica: The reward for this man is 5000 dollars, is that right?
Cheyenne: Judas was content for 4970 dollars less.
Harmonica: There were no dollars in them days.
Cheyenne: But sons of bitches... yeah.

Once I finished with OUaTitW I moved on to one of my Criterion Collection discs which I've never found the time to watch before now. The disc in question is David Lean and Noel Coward's Brief Encounter and I'm watching it as I type this. It's quite well done and, for someone who's used to Lean's epic films, it's a nice change of pace to see him handling something a bit more intimate.

Anyway, to get to the point of my title for this post, I was inspired by picking one of my Criterion discs to check out the Criterion site and browse through their catalogue and check out some of the essays they have posted on their site (the same ones they include with some of their releases) when I ran into this.

Now, I understand that there are some movies Criterion and I will differ on as being relevant or true classics of the form, but I didn't think anyone would have perceived Armageddon as something worthy of getting the Criterion treatment. Seven Samurai, sure. Brazil, sure. Heck, I'll even go so far as to say I'm not completely opposed to including the films of Kevin Smith (based entirely on their indie street cred), but having Michael Bay's overbloated action/sci-fi/disaster epic on the list just boggles my mind.

Maybe I'm being overly harsh, maybe I need to watch it again. I have friends who think it's an underrated movie (albeit not a classic) so maybe I'm missing some great kernal of genius that Bay has injected into it. Now that I think on it a bit, it's possible that it's being included for Bay's dynamic directorial style (which is undeniable), but this essay kind of asserts that the story has some merit as well.

Well, I'm missing too much of my movie while typing this stuff up so I'm going to get back to it. The two lovers are kissing on the bridge and the Rachmaninoff is swelling. Time to run.

mike