Quest For Fire
The Oscar for Best Makeup is
icing on the cake, but let's face it, nobody really knows what your basic early
human Cro-Magnon looked like.
My delight in this film has
nothing to do with makeup. The "moment" in Quest For Fire is Naoh (Everett McGill) watching in epiphanic
amazement as a young boy of the Ivaka tribe makes fire with two sticks.
Imagine that all your life you've
been driving a succession of stolen cars that mysteriously stop running after a
while, and you could never figure it out. One day you see a young fella with
his Hyundai at one of those places that have pairs of big shiny machines, each with
an attached hose and nozzle, and this
kid is sticking the nozzle into the recessed pipe over the left rear fender of
his car and….
Suddenly you feel like a Cro-Magnon.
And the movie is heroic in many
ways: tribesmen sacrificing themselves for their fellow early humans, salvation
as a reward for good deeds, a love interest that makes a baby and keeps Mom and
Dad together, staring at the same moon that you and I see….
And the monosyllabic proto-language
is surprisingly easy to decipher, with body language and facial expressions contributing
just as much to understanding as they do today.
Great low-key adventure film, straight,
no chaser.
No comments:
Post a Comment