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June 16th, 2011
Robert Cattani: A Few Movies All Dads Love
Robert Cattani here, pumped to commence another bedlam of floated ideas, belligerent opinions, and listless critique on the very juice that flows through the cinephile’s veins – film. What’s great about movies is that they exist in many forms – there are movies for people stricken with bloodlust, movies that tickle the show tune lover’s fancy, movies that put the dreamer in a reverie, movies’ whose epinephrine charged scenes feed the adrenaline hungry.
Today, I’d like to zero in on some of the films all fathers love.
- Blazing Saddles, 1974 – Written and directed by the undisputed master of spoof Mel Brooks, this movie is a comedy Western that stars Gene Wilder and the late Cleavon Little. My dad, Robert Cattani, Sr. loves everything about this movie – the scene at Graumann’s Chinese Theater, the pie fight, and the obligatory Western fadeout into the sunset shot.
- The Godfather, 1972 – Francis Ford Coppola’s masterful saga about a mob dynasty with a loving family at its heart, this film seamlessly blends together two main things that dads like: an unabashed display of power, crime, and passion, and a masculine yet vulnerable patriarch they can relate to.
- Die Hard, 1988 – The story of how New York cop John McClane outsmarts a gang of international terrorists that has taken over an LA high-rise on Christmas Eve is another all-time hit with my old man. The plot involves planes, choppers, a hostage crisis, lots of gunfights and sneaky outmaneuvering, and a climactic, multi-storey fall by the ultimate Euro-trash action movie antagonist, Hans Gruber.