Today is
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Fire Central
Fire Videos
| Videos and movies about fires and firefighting. |
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| Fire & Rescue |
Before the title screen even appears, the action has begun with an interrupted firehouse meal, the slide down the pole, and the engine's race to the scene of a building ablaze. Mike the firefighter guides kids through the process of becoming a firefighter, explains briefly and simply the equipment used, and takes viewers through a typical day. This 31-minute video was shot at a variety of station houses in New England and Trenton, New Jersey, using real firefighters and real situations. Whether it's putting out fires (with hoses, pickaxes, and ladder trucks), rescuing a boat-accident victim, or taking apart a smashed car to retrieve the injured driver, videomaker Fred Levine manages to show plenty of action while neatly avoiding any human injury that could be distressing to young children. For ages 4 and up, although vehicle enthusiasts as young as 2 will enjoy. --Kimberly Heinrichs
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| Quest for Fire |
| Quest for Fire is so detailed in its depiction of prehistoric man that it might have been made by time-traveling filmmakers. Instead it's a bold and timeless experiment by visionary director Jean-Jacques Annaud (The Bear), inviting scientific debate while presenting a fascinating, imaginary glimpse of humankind some 80,000 years ago. Using diverse locations in Kenya, Scotland, and Canada, Annaud tells the purely visual story of five tribes (some more advanced than others) who depend on fire for survival. They "steal" fire from nature, but the actual creation of fire remains elusive, lending profound mystery and majesty to the film's climactic, real-time display of fire-making ingenuity. Employing primitive language created by novelist Anthony Burgess and body language choreographed by anthropologist Desmond Morris, a unique ensemble of actors push the envelope of their profession, succeeding where they easily could've failed. They're carnal, violent, funny, curious, and intelligent; through them, and through the eons, we can recognize ourselves. --Jeff Shannon
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| Courage Under Fire |
| A year after a devastating friendly fire incident during the Gulf War, Lt. Colonel Nathaniel Serling (Denzel Washington) is in a Washington, D.C., desk job assigned the rudimentary task of overseeing a Medal of Honor candidate who died in the war. However, the case and soldier in question are a political hot potato--Captain Karen Walden (Meg Ryan) is America's first female soldier to be killed in combat. Serling soon finds discrepancies in the case of a downed Medevac helicopter in the rocky Kuwait territory. What unfolds in flashback are several versions of Walden's tactics (à la Kurosawa's Rashomon) to rescue the soldiers and survive the downing. As with Glory, Director Edward Zwick's cast of unknown and famous faces always comes off as the real article. Walden's crew is especially convincing. Matt Damon as the medic comes off as the giddy scaredy-cat when telling his story to Washington. In battle he's a flawed, humorous soldier. The most surprising work in the movie is done by Lou Diamond Phillips (as the group's gunman), whose career had been headed to straight-to-video oblivion. Then there's Ryan. She has done well with dramatic work in the past (When a Man Loves a Woman, Flesh and Bone) but has never been able to escape the romantic-comedy image. With dyed hair, a light accent, and the dramatics of the situation, Ryan finally has an enduring dramatic film. Even though she has half of Washington's screen time, her brave and ultimately haunting performance makes Courage something special, right down to its curious but rewarding final scene. --Doug Thomas
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| Reign of Fire |
| The Road Warrior meets Dragonslayer in the briskly entertaining post-apocalyptic action thriller Reign of Fire. Reign of Fire exists primarily to give us a bigger and better dragon than the Vermithrax Pejorative of 1981's classic Dragonslayer, and in that regard, the special effects are mightily impressive; the reptilian fire-breathers are stupendously convincing. While the earlier film offers a richer, more whimsical medieval adventure, Reign of Fire is a fast-moving tale of man versus dragon that takes place in the charred England of 2020, after Earth has been scorched by rapidly multiplying dragons and the aftermath of a futile nuclear counterstrike. Mixing high-tech gadgetry with primitive survivalism, X-Files alumnus Rob Bowman makes the most of his midlevel budget, establishing a lavish castle base for the rugged, adversarial teaming of Christian Bale and Matthew McConaughey as dragonslayers on the brink of extinction. With a steady supply of crowd-pleasing highlights, Reign of Fire is a pyrotechnical treat. --Jeff Shannon
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| Fire on the Amazon (Unrated Edition) |
Part potboiler, part work of conscience, Fire on the Amazon is a cheesy but effective drama set against the ecological disaster of South America's disappearing rain forest. As these tropical-topical movies often go, the story is told through the adventures of outsiders, in this case a cynical photojournalist (Craig Sheffer) and a dedicated activist (Sandra Bullock), both from America. After initial skirmishes, the good-looking pair find themselves immersed in a growing war between a corrupt army and an organized, well-armed resistance mounted by indigenous people. Much sadness and outrage follow as the innocent are decimated along with the land, and this season of grief brings our protagonists together in love. The film's notorious if rarely seen erotic interlude, both in its R-rated and unrated versions, is hardly perfunctory, yet director Luis Llosa (Anaconda) shoots it as a piece of soft-core fluff. Credit that to executive producer Roger Corman, the legendary showman who knows how to sell even the most serious low-budget production with a hint of schlock. Fire on the Amazon was originally made in 1990 and its release was delayed several years, finally prompted by Bullock's rising stature in Hollywood. She's actually quite good in it, as is Sheffer, and their respective fans would probably enjoy the actors' performances. --Tom Keogh
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| Escape! Because Accidents Happen: Fire |
Stop, drop, and roll! Fire is a terrifying force of nature that can tear through a house or office in seconds, leaving only a trail of wreckage and bodies. But, as Nova reports in Escape! Because Accidents Happen: Fire, there is some hope against this unpredictable enemy. Scientists and architects are working together to improve the safety of our buildings and public structures so as to avoid catastrophes such as the terrible 1987 London subway fire that took 31 lives, and firefighters are continually developing new equipment to help them survive the 1,000-degree temperatures inside raging fires. Using interviews with fire-safety professionals and survivors, footage from terrible disasters, and film clips from testing laboratories, Nova shows that more and more fires are preventable and survivable and offers suggestions for viewers to improve their own chances. --Rob Lightner
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| In the Line of Fire |
| This smart, tautly directed thriller from Wolfgang Petersen is about the cat-and-mouse games between a Secret Service agent named Horrigan (Clint Eastwood) and the brilliant, psychopathic assassin (John Malkovich) who's itching to get the President in his cross hairs. The back-story--Horrigan is haunted by his inability to prevent John Kennedy's assassination (Eastwood is computer-generated into archival footage)--is more than a little hokey, but the plotting itself is smartly, even ingeniously, constructed. Petersen manages a viselike grip on the tension and Eastwood even gets to deliver an ever-more-timely lecture on the diminished nature of the office of President. Eastwood's as gruff and as infuriating to the by-the-book Powers That Be as ever, and Malkovich oozes delightful menace. Renee Russo capably costars as a colleague with whom Horrigan gets friendly. --David Kronke
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| What To Do In Case Of Fire |
| A heavy-handed but engrossing German drama about a group of ex-radicals who try to escape the ever-closer clutches of the police after a 15-year-old bomb they planted accidentally goes off, What to Do in Case of Fire paints a questionably sympathetic portrait of people trying to erase their pasts. Occasionally the humor found in the group's difficulty grasping the changes the years have wrought erases the distasteful attempt to whitewash these anarchists' violent past. Still, it's a copout to pretend that these particular radicals never seemed to have hurt anyone seriously, and indeed, even the exploded bomb only slightly injures two innocent bystanders. It's up to the considerable efforts of a most capable cast--including Til Schweiger (Tim) and Nadja Uhl (Nele)--to draw us into their morally skewered story. --Kevin Filipski
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| The Day the Earth Caught Fire |
| Despite its melodramatic title, which carried on a '50s doomsday naming convention, this taut 1961 English science fiction thriller offers an object lesson in the power of story over special effects. When both the Soviets and the West detonate nuclear tests simultaneously, the seismic double whammy jolts the earth off its axis and onto a new orbit sending it fatally closer to the sun--a fate that writer-director-producer Val Guest views from the street-level perspective of its principal characters, rather than an off-world vantage point. The street in question, however, is London's Fleet Street, the venerable hub of its newspaper and tabloid publishers, and the hard-nosed reporters growing realization that their number is up carries its own stark punch. Edward Judd is Peter Stenning, a rugged, appropriately grim reporter, Leo McKern is tough but compassionate editor Bill Maguire, and Janet Munro is Stenning's love interest, in an elfin, sexy turn that's a striking contrast to her best-known turn in Disney's Darby O'Gill and the Little People. With an effects arsenal that consists largely of a spray bottle to apply beads of "sweat," Guest and his small but crack cast are surprisingly effective, and the cold war plot hook still works, thanks to its uncomfortable proximity to more contemporary environmental terrors. --Sam Sutherland
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