Brazil (1985)

 

Brazil

It is possible to see a trend in the production of Terry Gilliam from his work with Monty Python to his movies in the eighties. What starts out as silly, anarchistic sketches, takes on an increasingly acerbic character in the Monty Python movies until by the time of Brazil there is a bitterness that is oddly at conflict with the comedy and makes for an uneasy combo. As a long time Python fan, it hurts saying it, but I was not greatly pleased with Gilliam’s “Brazil”.

“Brazil” takes place in a strange nightmarish world and more than anything, it is this world which is the main character of the movie. It is the unholy love child of a threesome of runaway bureaucracy, totalitarianism and consumerism. A system where everybody is a slave to forms, procedures and files, where the individual influence and power is zero and where the only thing anybody cares about is buying and credit ratings. This is a highly technical world where nothing, least of all the technology, works. It was likely all the things Gilliam hated, ramped up to eleven.

This world is both wildly scary and comically stupid. This is the Crimson Permanent Assurance setting sail on the high seas of finance as a pirate ship absurdity, but without the gleam in the eye. The elite are wearing shoes for hats and killing themselves with unnecessary plastic surgery, but it is not funny. Robert De Niro has a small role as the pirate heating engineer, Tuttle, who fears for his life when fixes the mess of the Central Services clowns. The Innocent Mr. Buttle is arrested instead of Tuttle because a bug messed with the printer and now he is tortured to death while the system is concerned that Mrs. Buttle was overcharged for the arrest. On paper hilarious but actually frightening in its inhuman brutality.

Through all this we follow Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce), a lowly office worker with a well-connected mother who wants him to advance, mostly to make her look good. Lowry is quite good at his work, but with no ambition of his own. That change when he recognizes a woman from his dreams, the truck driver Jill Layton (Kim Greist). In his dream, he is a winged, angel-like hero, rescuing a damsel in distress from her demonic captors. A dream which is throughout recognized by various renditions of the classic theme of “Brazil”.

The dream and Sam’s reality starts to merge when he learns that Jill is now hunted by the authorities, simply for embarrassing them. It becomes Sam’s real-life mission to save Jill as he saves the girl in his dream and soon they are on the run from the stormtroopers of the bureaucracy.

Everything in “Brazil” extends into the surreal, even Sam’s chase. There is a clear indication that eventually he turns mad and in this dream state his life starts making more sense than the reality he left.

I want to like all the dark humor, all the absurd notions and curious references, such as the Stairs of Odessa, but the bitterness is so overwhelming that the absurdity becomes scary rather than fun. The cleaner who keeps on cleaning in the middle of a shootout, the torturer playing with his little girl, the bureaucrat asking the wife of the arrested man for signatures in triplicates for the receipt of the arrest. It is all so brutal that it is just not that fun anymore.

Apparently, the audience at the time was also rather confused about the movie and it did not do that well. I can see that. While it is long, it has nothing to do with that. Even the confusing plot cannot entirely be blamed. I think it rests with the level of bitterness projected here. This is the helpless feeling of being a dehumanized victim of an uncaring bureaucracy. Not fun, just absurd and maddening.

I wonder what the system had done to Terry Gilliam.

     

The Time to Live and the Time to Die (Tong Nien Wang Shi) (1985)

 

The Time to Live and the Time to Die

When I lived in China, I learned a word, or maybe an expression, that went “Ha-bah” (probably the female form). I understood it as meaning “okaaayy... whatever” and we used it ourselves whenever we had not clue what was going on, which was something that happened daily. “Ha-bah” is exactly what comes to mind when I think of “The Time to Live and the Time to Die”.

I did not understand much of what was happening and even less of what was the point of the movie, so forgive me if I am vague in my description of it.

We are in Taiwan shortly after the Second World War. The family we are following came from mainland China and sort of expect to go back. Wikipedia names one of the children, who seem to go by the name Ah-ha, as the character we follow, but you could have fooled me. There is a father in poor health who die early on, a mother who dies fairly late and a grandmother who dies in the end. I have no clue how many children there are. It could be anything between two and five and do not ask me about their names or what actor played which of them.

The family have limited funds, the house is shabby and while the children are supposed to study hard, the boy(s) seem to be mere street hoodlums.

Time passes, the parents die, and the children grow older and that is about it.

Of course, this takes place over two hours plus, so it is kind of slow motion, but mostly it is the same happening again and again.

This does not mean this movie is entirely uninteresting, because we do get a view into an ordinary family’s life. Small worries, big worries, some shouting, eating, bathing and whatever it is people are doing. I am not certain I have ever gotten so close to a Chinese family life before, although walking on the back streets in Shanghai you do get glimpses of lives you would not otherwise know. I am not certain this voyeur look is enough to keep you interested for two hours, but as I had no clue what was supposed to be happening, I had plenty of time to look at details, such as the rice mats, the bathroom and the half-outdoors kitchen.

Director Hou Hsiao-hsien’s style is compared to Japanese Ozu with his static camera and passive view on what is happening in front of the camera, and it may be Hou is using some of the same techniques, but I think the major difference is that in Ozu’s static view, interesting things were playing out and I was able to decode them. In Hou’s view, whatever is going on is simply not that interesting.

There is of course the very likely explanation that I simply have not understood the movie and that this all is in fact very deep and groundbreaking. I cannot rule out that I am simply too stupid for this movie or too uninterested in Ah-ha’s life and that is my personal failing. With that in mind I think I will leave it there.

Ha-bah.

Den kroniske uskyld (1985)

Off-List: Den kroniske uskyld 

The third off-List movie of 1985 is a Danish movie, “Den kroniske uskyld”, which IMDB translates to “The Chronic Innocence”. It is based on a book by author Klaus Rifbjerg and was a big hit in Denmark when it came out in 1985.

Janus (Allan Olsen) and Tore (Tjhomas Algren) are in their senior year in high school (or the Danish equivalent). Tore has returned from a period living in Jutland and has resumed his role as central character among his friends. Janus is the classic follower, the squire of the knight and generally allows Tore to lead the way.

One of the first things that happens after his return, is that a new girl is showing up. Helle (Simone Bendix) is very pretty and both boys are knocked off their feet. At the high school party, it is clear that it will be Tore and Helle that will be the couple, and Janus who gets the ungrateful role as friend. Being, as he is, always close to Tore, Janus becomes a very close witness to their relationship. Janus is also our narrator and mixed in with the story of Helle and Tore, we clearly sense his own frustration. Something he takes out on the willing, but not very cultured, Inger (Helle Fastrup).

The real monster here, though, is Helle’s mother, Mrs. Junkersen (Susse Wold, whose character never gets a first name). Already when we get the first glimpse of her, there is something sinister about her. Janus learns that she has previously taken over her daughter’s boyfriends and it is clear that Helle is reluctant to introduce Tore to her mother. To no avail, Mrs. Junkersen introduces herself and quickly takes the lead. It is obvious that she is very wealthy, gets what she wants, and is enjoying being admired. Think of a Mrs. Robinson as a spider queen, playing with and eating her prey.

Tore is blind to all this, but Janus sees it and is scared. Never mind his own jealousy, when he sees what Mrs. Junkersen is after he gets worried and protective of his friends.

The story climaxes at the graduation party in the house of Mrs. Junkersen. Here she goes all out vamp, and Tore does not stand a chance with tragic results.

Despite moments of humor this is a fairly downbeat affair. We know already going in of an impeding doom, we just do not know how bad things get. If you are looking for a silly happy ending movie, this is not the one. Yet, this is also a sort of coming of age story, as most teenage stories are. It is a bitter lesson and a brutal innocence lost. In fact, this is less about growing up than of losing innocence. Janus is experiencing his own anger, frustration, fear, jealousy and worst of all a meanness in himself. But he also loses his naivete concerning his friends and their parents. He ends up wiser on himself and other people, while some of the others succumb.

This all sound gloomy, and I suppose it is, but there are also a number of highlights that make the movie easier to watch. For me, this was a window into familiar places 40 years ago. The music was precisely the music we heard at parties back then. The cloth, the jargon, it is all very familiar. Imagine you could buy a pint size plastic cup of tap beer for 20 kroner, yes, I remember that even though it would be a handful of years before I would buy that myself. When they go around in Copenhagen, I recognize the places and so much look the same. It brings it all very close    

There is also a lot of joviality between the adolescents, the banter is fun and the relationship between Helle and Tore is beautiful, even if it feels unfair that it is pretty boy Tore who gets the pretty girl.

I actually never watched “Den kroniske uskyld” before now and it is sort of a miss. I guess I feared it would be a rough ride, and it is, but it is also one of those movies I am happy to have watched.

Back to the Future (1985)

 

Tilbage til fremtiden

“Back to the Future” is one of the really big movies. One of those everybody knows and many, if not most, love. I have watched it countless times, I know all the lines, have found lots of the easter eggs and can go into a heated discussion on timelines and paradoxes. So, yeah, I am a bit nerdy on this one, but so are tons of people. Just look at the Wikipedia page. I do not think even the Star Wars page is as big and detailed as this one.

If you need a plot summary for this one, I really think you are reading the wrong blog, but very briefly: Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) is a high school kid who is friends with an inventor called Dr. Emmet Brown (Christopher Lloyd). Marty plays guitar, drives around on a skateboard and is late for school and thus a very relatable character for teenagers. Doc Brown is this white-haired, wild-eyed manic type that makes him the quintessential mad scientist. Also, Doc Brown has made a time machine... out of a DeLorean.

To power the flux-capacitor (that makes time travel possible) it needs a phenomenal amount of energy, 1.21 GW to be exact (or the amount of power produced by 121 big offshore wind turbines on full load). Luckily plutonium does the trick. Unluckily, the Libyan terrorists who provided the plutonium were not so pleased with the nuclear bomb full of pinball machine parts Doc Brown made for them and show up, pissed and all, in the middle of the test run of the time machine. Marty McFly narrowly escapes in the DeLorean, triggers the time machine and ends up in 1955. Can Marty find some plutonium to get back and avoid messing up his own future?

“Back to the Future” does everything right. The premise of the movie is interesting with plenty of opportunity for interesting adventures. How would it be to meet your parents when they were your age? What if you triggered the butterfly effect, changed a small thing in the past with massive result is the future? How would you cope with life in the past or how would the past cope if you presented it with something from the future?

The tone is comedy, but not silly or stupid comedy. We believe in the characters and the situations all the way, something too often forgotten in modern comedies, and both the situations and the characters are highly amusing, if not hilariously funny. One of the famous behind-the-scenes stories tell that filming was quite far with another actor as Marty McFly, until they realized that he simply was not hitting that tone of comedy. Instead, they drew in Michael J. Fox, re-shot those scenes and nailed it. Lots of scenes take place in the night because Fox was engaged in another production during the day.

This was a brilliant move. Fox and Lloyd have incredible chemistry, or maybe I have just watched this so many times that I feel they belong together. Then again, I can say that of the entire cast. Crispin Glover makes for an amazing George McFly, Leo Thomson works convincingly as Lorraine Baines/McFly and best of all Thomas F. Wilson is the most glorious villain, Biff. Wilson is the nicest guy imaginable, but as Biff he is mean, brutal and incredibly low... and hilariously funny.

The score is perfect. Alan Silvestri’s themes are now pop culture classics, instantly recognized the world over, Huey Lewis’ “The Power of Love” became a hit (Did you know it is himself dismissing his music as “just too loud” in the rehearsal scene?) and several classic fifties hits play significant parts in the story (How was it Chuck Barry came up with the sound for “Johnny B. Goode”?).

Finally, the movie is simply exciting. It is paced well, tense in its moments, adventurous (did I already mention that?) and not afraid of giving us a visual spectacle, yet keeping the special effects in rein.

Great Scott! Wouldn’t I like to have a such a DeLorean?

Then I would say: “Where we are going, we don’t need roads”

 

The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985)

 The Purple Rose of Cairo

My personal opinion that the best Woody Allen movies are those without Woody Allen just got another confirmation. While “The Purple Rose of Cairo” is undisputably a Woody Allen movie, he is himself absent from the movie and the movie totally works.

We are in New Jersey during the Great Depression where Cecilia (Mia Farrow) is a not very successful waitress, living in a not very successful relationship with the abusive and lazy Monk (Danny Aiello). Cecilia spends her time dreaming of something better and nowhere more so than in the cinema.

Her current favourite movie is a romantic flick called “The Purple Rose of Cairo” and she watches it as often as she can get away with it. One fateful evening something weird happens. The character Tom Baxter (Jeff Daniels), an archaeologist who in the movie will fall in love with a cabaret singer, suddenly turns around and addresses Cecilia directly. He has noticed that she is always there and looking at him and he want to know her. Tom steps out of the movie and leave the cinema with Cecilia.

Unsurprisingly, this gets both very strange and really messy. The movie cannot go on without Tom, leaving the other characters in confusion, the cinema owner does not know if he dares stop the movie and calls the studio in a panic. The studio is at a loss on what to do since this is spreading to other towns and sends the actor behind the Tom Baxter character, Gil Shepherd, to New Jersey to convince Tom to rejoin the movie. Meanwhile, Cecilia and Tom have a most strange affair with Tom realizing that the real world is a lot more complicated than his movie world and Cecilia trying to balance everything going on. This is not getting easier when Gil shows up and seduces her. Now Cecilia has to chose between a fantasy character or a real-life man.

It is very easy to recognize this as a Woody Allen movie. He has projected a lot of his own characters into the Cecilia character, making her a female version of himself. Woody Allen also has a thing for the period between the wars and in many ways “The Purple Rose of Cairo” is a parallel to his later movie “Midnight in Paris”, which incidentally is my favourite Woody Allen movie. While Owen Wilson’s character is being transported back to the 1920’ies, Cecilia is being transported into the world of her movies (in the thirties) and this daydream or surreal experience helps them find out something about themselves and get out of a rut they are stuck in.

The idea of getting in and out of a movie harks back to at least Buster Keaton’s “Sherlock Jr.” and this is an obvious inspiration. A decade or so after “The Purple Rose of Cairo”, this theme was explored again in “The Last Action Hero” with a lot of the same points. This is both a very outlandish theme and one that most people cannot help to have had, watching movies, “what if I could join the movie or maybe these people would show up in real life?”. It takes some juggling to make us suspend our disbelief, but I think Allen is quite successful here, mainly by making it a comedy. By using it for comedic effect, we can laugh off the elements that makes no sense and the craziness becomes part of the fun.

This is where I think “The Purple Rose of Cairo” gets successful, it is genuinely funny. Not in the slapstick manner of “Sherlock Jr.”, but in the messy way an Allen movie gets funny with the critical element that we are spared Allen himself. Mia Farrow and Jeff Daniels are fully able to lift this kind of comedy, and I was having a great time watching this.

I honestly expected this to be a movie I just had to get over with and then it turned out to be one of the best movies so far of 1985. Highly recommended.

 

Out of Africa (1985)

 

Mit Afrika

“Out of Africa” was one of the big winners at the Academy Awards for this year, and it is not difficult to see why. This is a gorgeous looking movie with A-list actors and a biopic that avoids many of the classic story-arch tropes. I believe I only watched it once before, at an age where I was totally unable to appreciate it.

Karen Dinesen (Meryl Streep), of affluent family and Bror Blixen (Klaus Maria Brandauer), a Swedish Baron, both long to get away to live a different life and so make an alliance of convenience and move together to Kenya, a British colony in 1913, to setup a farm. Karen, now Baroness Blixen, soon finds herself pretty much alone on the farm as Bror is busy everywhere else than home. She has to learn to navigate this very different environment the hard way, but she gets to love her life on the farm and her interactions with the Kikuyu tribe as well as the Western community.

Through her friendship with Denys Finch Hatton (Robert Redford) she gets to appreciate the wilderness, which makes for an odd counterpoint to her very European home at the farm. Yet, her wilderness skills come in handy when, instead of being evacuated during the war, she opt to run supplies through the wilderness to troops fighting Germans in Tanzania (then German East Africa). As her relationship with Bror becomes increasingly estranged, her relationship with Denys develops into an awkward romance. Awkward, because it challenges Denys free spirit nature. Yet, it is safe to say that Karen Blixen was also quite a headstrong free spirit herself.

Rather than the custom happy ending, the finale is something of a collapse. Certainly, Karen’s African adventure comes to a sudden halt, but even that is done with a poetic touch and not without beauty.

To my great shame I have never read anything by Karen Blixen, and I have not even visited her home, Rungstedlund, now a museum, even though it is only a short drive from where I live. Yet, I am familiar enough with her appearance and reputation and, knowing that, trying to apply those on Meryl Streep’s character is an interesting exercise. I think she does it quite well. There is a long way from the old lady I am familiar with to the young woman moving to Kenya, but I sense her spirit here. Only clear miss is the awful attempt at replicating Karen Blixen’s characteristic haughty Rungsted accent. It just sound weird and sometimes it is entirely forgotten.

I very much like that this is a biopic that try to tell her story and tell us why it is that she is supposed to be special. Of course there is a lot of human-interest elements, but these are integral parts of her story and are not overshadowing her work and the personality that would grow into the famous writer she became. I also like that, despite some deviations from her actual history, the story development is tied to her real life. It takes the story in directions an invented story with its requirements to follow a Hollywood story-arch, would never go.

This is a slow picture. Despite it’s 160 minutes, the story is fairly easy to sum up, but I think this slow pacing was a good choice for this movie. It has to dwell on the characters and the situations for it to get under our skin. It allows us to get familiar with Karen Blixen’s life in Africa, even in details that might otherwise be neglected because it is in those details the story gets special.

“Out of Africa” is also a window into colonial Africa. In hindsight we can mock or be upset about the colonial order of things, such as the white Europeans looking completely out of place, yet lording it among the natives, but I think the movie has enough sensitivity that it can both show the absurdity in this status and find objectively good elements happening. The Masai are described with awe and respect, the issues around schooling for people who until recently had no use of it, and the potential conflict between economic development and preservation of nature and culture. There are a lot of layers in this movie, and it is its slowness that allow them to be there.

I liked “Out of Africa” a lot better than I expected I would, and I think I will point towards this one in the future when discussing biopics. It is a movie for adults, but I think I have finally grown old enough to watch and enjoy it.

 

 

  

Weird Science (1985)

 

Off-List: Weird Science

When I was in eight’s grade, the coolest movie I watched that year was “Weird Science”. For a nerdy teenage boy, this tapped into... everything and we watched it in a computer evening class, no kidding (though it was more a club for gamers than anything else. Gaming here meaning Commodore 64...if you were there, you know). Therefore, how can this movie not be one of my off-List movies for 1985?

Wyatt (Ilan Mitchell-Smith) and Gary (Anthony Michael Hall) are nerdy teenage boys who dream of girls but are utterly afraid of them. It appears that the only friends they have are each other. Besides being hazed by other boys from the school, Wyatt’s brother, Chet (Bill Paxton), goes out of his way to make life difficult for Wyatt.

While watching “Frankenstein” on the television Gary get the idea that they can make a simulation of a woman on Wyatt’s computer and use it to, well, learn and test out freaky stuff. Soon they are sitting with bras on their heads, feeding the computer information on women while it is hooked up on a mainframe and connected to a doll. At this point something weird happens. They tap into something magic and it works, they have conjured up a real woman, except this is not a normal woman but then super model Kelly LeBrock with magic abilities. Lisa, as they call her, is all at their disposal. Their wildest dream come true, Gary and Wyatt have no idea what to do with it and a number of comical situations ensue. The take a shower with her, go to a blues bar and hang out at the mall. Seeing how incapable the boys are, Lisa gets in action to help out. She invites everybody to a party a Wyatt’s home, including two girls, Deb (Suzanne Snyder) and Hilly (Judie Aronson) whom Gary and Wyatt particularly like.

This of course goes completely off on a tangent. A lot of magic stuff happens as Lisa can make and transform anything and particularly when the boys try to show off by re-doing the experiment, but accidentally conjure up a Pershing II missile instead of a woman... In a climactic scene the house gets invade by doom bikers, upset they were not invited. Will Gary and Wyatt step into character?

This is a magic movie that really requires you to suspend your disbelief. There are a lot of things that do not add up, but none of that matters. It is wacky and nuts, and hilariously funny. Some things unintentionally, as the 1985 version of hacking into a mainframe while other stuff is just insane as the missile or the freezing of Wyatt’s (annoying) grandparents.

At the centre of it, of course, is the two boys who have to get out of their shell. As in most coming-of-age stories, particularly the Hollywood ones, this means they have to stand up for themselves and dominate somebody else, in this case the bikers. Doing that they have now qualified to have girlfriends.

Almost forty years later, “Weird Science” is not as amazing as I thought it was back then, but that would have been a tall order. It is maybe a little too magic and certainly way too cliché, but it is still hilariously fun. I laughed a lot watching it and my son, who is now in eight’s grade totally loved it. That means something. I still love movies about geeks who get the girls and do awesome stuff.

The movie also features a young Robert Downey Jr. as one of the boys hazing Gary and Wyatt. He needs no other introduction.

I really love eighties comedies, and this is one more to the collection.