Ocean's Week: It's not in my nature to be mysterious, but I can't talk about it, and I can't talk about why

OCEAN'S TWELVE

2004

Directed by Steven Soderbergh

Written by George Nolfi

Spoilers: high

Ocean's Week: I have a question. Say we get into the cage, through the security doors there, and down the elevator we can't move, and past the guards with the guns, and into the vault we can't open...

OCEAN'S ELEVEN

2001

Directed by Steven Soderbergh

Written by Ted Griffin

Spoilers: moderate

Ocean's Week: Fifty percent of something is better than one hundred percent of nothing

OCEAN'S 11

1960

Directed by Lewis Milestone

Written by George Clayton Johnson, Jack Golden Russell, Harry Brown, and Charles Lederer

Spoilers: moderate

Get your ass to Mars

MARS EXPRESS

2023 eux/2024 nous

Directed by Jérémie Périn

Written by Laurent Safarti and Jérémie Périn

Spoilers: moderate

What a disaster: We're an airplane, not a spaceship

STARFLIGHT ONE

aka Starflight: The Plane That Couldn't Land, and other titles

1983

Directed by Jerry Jameson

Written by Gene Warren, Peter R. Brooke, and Robert Malcolm Young

Spoilers: moderate

What a disaster: The Jerry Jameson TV roundup, part 2

In which we discuss Terror On the 40th Floor, The Deadly Tower, Superdome, and A Fire In the Sky, concluding our overview of the disaster telefilms Jerry Jameson directed in the 70s, which began here., where we dealt with Heatwave!, The Elevator, and Hurricane.

TERROR ON THE 40th FLOOR (1974)

When I set myself to the disaster telefilms of Jerry Jameson, I negligently failed to realize there were this many, so many that even just "the disaster telefilms of Jerry Jameson of 1974" became a fractal, neverending endeavor, so that I suppose that after doing three previously and only realizing I'd missed a fourth now, I wouldn't be entirely surprised if there were, somehow, four more still lurking out there to make me look foolish.  Fortunately, Terror On the 40th Floor doesn't change anything I said about The Elevator, which is, if anything, even more comfortably Jameson's best movie of an extremely busy 1974.  Similar in setting and somewhat in concept to The Elevator, what we've actually got here isn't that at all, and it's pretty shameless and more than a little suspect just from the outset: a skyscraper-on-fire TV disaster movie aired three months before The Towering Inferno came out in theaters in December.  If that sounds hackish and mercenary and even gauche to you (yet actually about two months too early to properly parasitize on the marketing and hype for The Towering Inferno, especially when Airport 1975 is presently playing on the big screen), you're pretty much right; this is quite low-effort material.  A notable distinction, anyway, is that The Towering Inferno is legitimately "about something"—mostly that fire is hot, sure—but also that skyscrapers and perhaps the system that produces them are an affront to morality, and the disaster there is triggered by greed and hubris and poor regulation; in Terror on the 40th Floor, the disaster is triggered by a drunken blue collar worker spilling fire all over everything.

It's a

TRAP

2024

Written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan

Spoilers: moderate

Tornadon't

TWISTERS

2024

Directed by Lee Isaac Chung

Written by Joseph Kosinski and Mark L. Smith

Spoilers: moderate

A cabin in the woods

KNOCK AT THE CABIN

2023

Directed by M. Night Shyamalan

Written by Steve Desmond, Michael Sherman, and M. Night Shyamalan (based on the novel The Cabin At the End of the World by Paul G. Tremblay)

Spoilers: high

What a disaster: The Jerry Jameson TV roundup, part 1

In which we discuss Heatwave!, Hurricane, and The Elevator.

Our retrospective of the disaster cinema of the 1970s left its main phase back when we arrived at 1980, whereupon we treated with Irwin Allen's final effort, When Time Ran Out..., as well as, of course, the parody that was disaster cinema's own disaster, somewhat killing the genre off for years to come, Airplane!; after that, there was no real compulsion to be even more thorough than I already had been, as there would only be side-quests left anyway, and these were to be completed at leisure and for their own pleasure: Airplane II: The Sequel; the original disaster cinema parody, The Big Bus; and one day, I swear I'll get to the Japanese branch of the genre.  For now, there's this.  Obviously, nobody is forcing me, and I doubt it would have occurred to anybody to even ask me, to backtrack through the television movies of Jerry Jameson.  But I did anyway.  (Then again, there was that guy who kept at me, justifiably enough, for like two years to finally get to Raise the Titanic.)  Initially, this was supposed to be a stopgap for the lull in reviews this late July—minimalist reviews, cross-posted from Letterboxd and cleaned up.  Well, they're not going to be maximalist.  But the main thing is that later on I still want to tell you about Starflight One, a very cool TV disaster movie from all the way out in the wilderness of 1983, this being a telefilm directed by, you guessed, Jerry Jameson; and if that was to have a place here, then it only feels right to deal with all of his other disaster telefilms, of which there were at least three and perhaps six, depending on your definition of "disaster movie."  (ETA: oh, for hell's sake, there's seven.)  We'll be going broader with that definition than I actually believe is correct, but there are so many fuzzy lines in life, aren't there?  To be clear, this does not open the way towards a pathologically completionist "all disaster films of the 70s, even the TV movies" campaign, or at least I hope it doesn't.