I remember walking out of the theater with a group of my first-year college friends after watching Edward Zwick’s (The Last Samurai, Blood Diamond) Legends of the Fall when my one friend turned to me and said, “I feel like I just want go in a hole and die now.” Truer words couldn’t have been spoken for, perhaps, the most extensive epic I had seen in a theater until that point in my life. I knew little about the film besides that it starred Brad Pitt (Twelve Monkeys, Se7en), and it could be a darker, more adult-oriented version of the beloved A River Runs Through It. The unknown was just a fraction of what made Legends of the Fall become one of my favorite movies of all time and one that has never fallen out of my Top 50. That is until my 2023 rewatch, some 15 years after I last watched the film.
Category Archives: Edward Zwick
About Last Night (1986)
I would have seen it years ago if I had been made aware of how great Edward Zwick’s movie was. I had always known About Last Night was an 80’s classic, but I associated it with cheesy teenage comedies like The Breakfast Club, St. Elmo’s Fire, and Pretty in Pink. And while those movies have a certain charm, I put them all into the same category. By association, I also classified About Last Night with those movies because of the stars Rob Lowe and Demi Moore. Over time, I, for whatever reason, associated the plot with two people who met, had a wild night of sex, and then spent the rest of the movie regretting that decision. This story didn’t interest me either. I’ve seen that movie play out hundreds of times on the screen. Had I not stumbled upon About Last Night on cable one night, I might never have seen it. Had I not, I may have forever missed out on a good movie.
Love & Other Drugs (2010)
The 2010’s Love & and Other Drugs trailer makes it seem like the movie is a romantic comedy. In actuality, that could not be further from the truth. While there is quite a bit of romance and lots and lots of humor, the movie is far more profound and dramatic than I could have imagined. No purely romantic comedy can take you through the range of emotions that Love & Other Drugs will take you through. This movie slipped under the radar, earning just $32 million at the box office. Referred to more as “that movie that has Jake Gyllenhaal (Nightcrawler, Brothers) and Anne Hathaway (Rachel Getting Married, Interstellar) naked the whole time,” it was more than it was anything else. I saw the movie for two reasons. The first was that I was intrigued by the buzz surrounding this movie’s release date.