Philadelphia Weekly

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Dear Catastrophe Waiting

Finally, the original Poseidon Adventure and Towering Inferno get respectful DVD treatment.

By Leo Charney

Add Comment | Comments: 0 | Posted May. 17, 2006

The sober marginalia feels like it's missing the point, and yet there's something to be said for giving the movies some respect. They're still gripping politically and dramatically, and they're also enjoyably campy. They're like a grab-bag of American movie history: from turn-of-the-century blow-shit-up attractions; to class-conscious Griffith sagas; to middlebrow ensemble soap operas like Grand Hotel, The Greatest Show on Earth and Ship of Fools; to the whole post-Star Wars generation of effects-driven epics that they anticipated.

With Wolfgang Petersen's impersonal Poseidon remake in theaters, let's give the last word to Inferno's noble architect, mulling his tower's charred ruins: "Maybe they ought to just leave it the way it is-kind of a shrine to all the bullshit in the world."

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