Take It Easy (1986)

Off-List: Take It Easy

The first additional movie for 1986 is the Danish pick. I ended up selecting “Take It Easy”, although I had never watched it before and selecting it solely from its interesting premise. In hindsight, I probably should have selected a different movie or skipping the Danish pick altogether for 1986.

It is the summer of 1945. The war in Europe has just ended and peacetime life is bubbling out like spring after a long winter. In the jazz bar “München” in Copenhagen, the local jazz band led the famous (in Denmark at least) pianist Leo Mathisen (Eddie Skoller) is setting the beat to the party. The patrons include rich and poor, quite a few American and British soldiers and our “heroes”, Herbert (Nikolaj Egelund) and Allan (Martin Elley).

Herbert and Martin are high school students who are more busy enjoying life than taking care of their school. They are black marketeers, which partly explains why they hang out at “München”, they chase girls, another reason, and especially Herbert wants desperately to be a jazz drummer.

To finance this ambition, he needs money, and his scheme is to rob his single mother (Helle Herz) of her valuables, selling it to the foreign solders for contraband and selling that at München.

I understand quite well that the movie is trying to give us the explosion of life after the war. Love is in the air, not just among the randy youth. Music is everywhere. Hope and optimism as symbolized by the vibrant summer pictures. Herbert and Allan are in that respect exponents for this invigorating springtime, they feel like kings to whom everything is possible and I suppose we should be loving them for it.

The problem here is that particularly Herbert is completely without a moral compass. One of the patrons at München is accusing him of lacking respect, but it is a lot worse than that. Herbert is a nihilist or maybe a narcissist who has eyes for only his own pleasure and ambition and cares nothing for what is right or wrong or other people’s feelings. That may be a good description of the average teenager, but with Herbert it is taken to the extreme and that is the essential problem with this movie. How can we care for a person who cares for nobody but himself?

I will not list all the many examples Herbert gives us of this nature, that would be tedious and pointless, but trust me, it is everywhere. What takes the cake though is when he sells his pianist mother’s beloved Steinway piano to get money for his drums. Although his friends convince him to get the piano back, his efforts are half hearted and rather than console his devastated mother, he goes to enjoy himself at the jazz bar.

For half the movie, I am waiting for two possible, redeeming outcomes: 1. Herbert get his comeuppance or 2. Herbert realize what an ass he is and aims for some self-improvement. We get nothing of the kind. Instead, the movie just ends...

I do not like Herbert one bit, but I am supposed to, and the movie cannot convince me.

This is a pretty important point against the movie. What does work though is the portrayal and atmosphere of the post-war period and especially the jazz music. For a Dane, much of the music played at the club are classics. Oldies, but classic, nonetheless. If this was enough to carry a movie, this would be a good movie. Unfortunately, it is merely background to what I can see only as a terrible story.

I do not think I will recommend “Take It Easy”.

 

Stand by Me (1986)

 

Sammenhold

“Stand by me” is based on a Stephen King story that was not in the horror genre, which in its own right is worth notice. Instead, it is a coming-of-age story made into a movie by Rob Reiner. Something also worth of notice. Rob Reiner has made a lot of very strong movies, and this was still early in his career.

In present day, writer Gordie Lahanche (Richard Dreyfuss, Will Wheaton) is reminiscing about an incident in his childhood (1959) where he and his friends went to see a dead body.

It is summer and the boys Gordie, Chris (River Phoenix), Teddy (Corey Feldman) and Vern (Jerry O’Connell) are hanging out in their treehouse (and a really cool treehouse at that). Vern has overheard his older brother talk about a body of a local boy left in the woods and so the boys decide to check that out. It is a long hike through the wilderness and when they finally get there, the body is “contested” by a group of older (and menacing) boys led by the scary Ace (Kiefer Sutherland). That is really it.

The real story however is what is happening with the boys on the walk to the body. It is quite literally an odyssey, both externally and internally.

On this walk the boys are facing a number of challenges. They escape from a junkyard owner and his menacing dog, they narrowly avoid getting run over by a train, they fall into a swamp where they get attacked by leeches and they spend a harrowing night, sleeping and standing guard in the woods before the final challenge in front of Ace.

The interesting journey however is the internal journey the boys are taking. Throughout the movie we listen to their banter and silly talk, but enmeshed in all this is a lot of uncertainty. Teddy is upset because his father is considered mentally ill and it is somehow rubbing off on him. Vern is insecure about everything. To him, just keeping up with the other boys is a victory all on its own. Chris is commonly considered a bad boy out of a bad family and the stigma is very oppressive. He is convinced he will be stuck in that role and that freaks him out. Gordie, himself, has a double problem. His brother Denny (John Cusack) has recently suffered a tragic death and though not outright blamed, Gordie clearly feels that his father would have preferred him to have died instead. Gordie is bookish and an aspiring writer, something his father has no interest in. This also means that Gordie will likely not take the same classes as his friends in the coming years and he may lose them.

Each of the boys will come to terms with their failings before the end and come out of this as better versions of themselves, so when they face Ace and his gang at the end, they know they have each other’s back. Well, at least Gordie has Chris back.

A story like this could be rather tedious and heavy handed. Both the coming of age and the odyssey themes are very old and classic, but, somehow, they are elegantly woven together here so I only realized near the end what was actually going on. Rob Reiner can probably take a lot of credit for that, but so can the four boys playing the protagonists. There is an ease to them assuming their roles that makes me believe that they really are those characters. When you think child actors, the natural reaction is to roll the eyes, but these four are very convincing and the selling point is the ease of their banter and the way they interact.

I also like very much that the tone never gets sentimental or outright silly. It is a balancing act to keep it real and you can sense that at times it must have been tempting to drive it a bit in one or the other direction. Gordie’s loss of a brother or Vern’s hunt for his penny treasure, but it never crosses the line and that makes the story very believable, and this is why I as a viewer care about these boys.

“Stand by Me” did not win a ton of Oscars and I had personally never heard of it before, but in my research, I found that this movie has been hugely influential on a lot of other filmmakers. When Jules and Vincent in “Pulp Fiction” go on and on about French burgers and what not, it is a direct reference to “Stand by Me”.

Definitely a positive experience.

  

The Color Purple (1985)

 

Farven Lilla

“The Color Purple” was Steven Spielberg’s attempt to move away from the youthful action and adventure films he had become famous for and try his hands on more serious and “adult” topics (as he called it himself). The story he chose is based on the novel of the same name by Alice Walker and there are plenty of adult themes here for his hands to work on. Incest, domestic violence, racism and poverty to mention a few.

Celie (Desreta Jackson / Whoopi Goldberg) and Nettie (Akosua Busia) are sisters in rural Georgia in the early twentieth century. Their father is abusive and as the movie opens Celie is giving birth to a child fathered by her own father, only for the child to be given away immediately.

Celie is given away as a bride to Albert Johnson (Danny Glover), whose first wife has died. Albert is just as abusive as Celie’s father so no news there, and she is as much a maid (or slave) in Albert’s household as anything else. Nettie runs away from the father and seeks shelter with Celie, but when she refuses Albert’s sexual advances, he kicks her out, kicking and screaming and even hides the letters Nettie writes to Celie over the years.

During Celie’s long “marriage” with Albert two sub-stories are in focus. Albert’s son Harpo (Willard Pugh) marries Sofia (Oprah Winfrey), a strong and stout woman who will not stand for the kind of treatment women gets in this household. She walks away with her children but eventually returns. She also gets 8 years in prison for refusing to become the maid of the white mayor’s wife.

The second story is that of Shug Avery (Margaret Avery). She is a free spirit performer who is chased by Albert. Eventually she moves into the household and befriends Celie. Over the years she seems to be coming and going a few times.

 As is clear from the above, this is a gruesome story with hardships and abuse all around. Starting out with Celie’s father siring children on his own daughter, arranged marriage, an abusive husband, racism and effective slavery. There is plenty here. In the hands of a realist filmmaker this could be a crushing movie.

Steven Spielberg is great, but he is not that kind of filmmaker. In his hands everybody comes about as... morons, as caricatures. He brought in a levity, an almost comic element, which I suppose is intended to make the movie watchable, but which I feel is mocking the characters. Rather than evil or mean, the abusive characters, whether they are the men or the white people, become clowns and fools. Yes, they certainly are fools, but that harmless veneer removes the edge of the movie. In the same vein, the black women, who are universally the victims of the story are getting a silly and hapless edge which seems to say that they are in their predicament because they are too stupid to free themselves and that is deeply unfair to the characters.

I have not read the book so I cannot tell if this actually originates there, but my suspicion is that this is the Spielberg touch and if that is the case, I think he may have been the wrong director for the movie.

His focus appears to be having Celie sit all this out patiently and overcome her hardships in a final rebellion. That is Spielberg Classic, but, I think, not really the story that needs to be told here.

There is plenty of production value her, though. The pictures are beautiful, and the acting is first class. Goldberg at the centre delivers a stellar performance and you can tell a lot of thought has gone in to recreate the era. If anything, it is almost too smooth. This is a story that may have benefitted more from a grittier production.

I suppose “The Color Purple” deserves credit for taking on the serious themes of this story. They are important, both in a historical context and in the present day, but I am not certain they were done a great service here. There is an edge missing that ultimately leaves me a bit disappointed. Spielberg would eventually make up for these flaws with “Schindler’s List”, but with “The Color Purple” the Spielberg touch missed the mark.

Manhunter (1986)

 

Manhunter

At this point I should have been reviewing “The Color Purple”, but when I inserted the DVD, I quickly realised I had bought the remake instead of the original. While I look for the right version of the movie, I am jumping ahead to 1986, to “Manhunter”.

“Silence of the Lambs” was not the first time Thomas Harris’ “Red Dragon” was made into a movie. Six years earlier, Michael Mann did his take on the story. One that, sadly, is now mostly forgotten.

The story is pretty much the same as in any of the other versions of the “Red Dragon” novel. An insane serial killer is on the loose (Tom Noonan). The FBI agent (William Petersen as Will Graham), searching for the murderer, consults criminal mastermind and monster superior Hannibal Lecktor (Brian Cox) in his attempt to get into the mind of the killer.

The main difference is the emphasis in “Manhunter” on the police procedure and less on the gory details and with a much-reduced part for Dr. Lecktor. To my personal taste this was a good decision, but also likely the reason the later movies are very much popular culture and “Manhunter“ is not.

Graham has retired from the bureau when his former boss, Jack Crawford (Dennis Farina), brings him back to do his magic again. Graham’s speciality is to get into the mind of the murderer and use that to stop him but when he did just that to catch Hannibal Lecktor, he suffered a nervous breakdown and retired. Needless to say, Graham’s wife is not happy about him going back to work.

The murderer apparently kills an entire family every full moon in the most gruesome manner. To all appearance, nothing connects the murdered families, but clearly it is the same murderer. The FBI follows every clue possible, and Grahams immersive work keeps producing hints for the police to follow. His consulting with Lecktor has the unpleasant consequence that Lecktor and the murderer starts to cooperate, endangering Graham and his family personally.

This is all about the chase. The clues, the police procedures, the attempts to lure the murderer out and the clock ticking until next full moon and a new victim. It is highly detailed and sometimes a bit difficult to follow, but wonderful with such attention to actual police work.

The second focus, of course, is how Graham gets swallowed up in the nightmare mind of the murderer. While Mann tries to make a lot out of that, I do not think it is being taken as far as the following movies and that means that the Lecktor element, while prominent, is not played as hard as in the later movies.

Instead, there is room for the Tooth-fairy, as the murderer is known as, and he is one sick person. The scenes where he takes his blind colleague Reba McClane (Joan Allen) home are creepy way beyond what is actually shown through what is hinted at.

 “Manhunter” is very much a movie of the eighties. The soundtrack, the dialogue and the editing, all make me expect some wobbly VHS effects. It is almost as if the budget is not quite enough for what it wants to do, but most of that is simply because it is older than the movies I would compare it to.

I am not certain why we need so many versions of this story, but this one at least scores points for being the first and it is really not bad at what it does and deserves to be remembered.

 

Shoah (1985)

 

Shoah

Over the past few weeks, I have been watching “Shoah”. It is a lengthy affair on a very tough subject, so it took some time to get through. I was joined by my wife who has a more direct connection with the Holocaust than me.

From 1975 to 1985, the French journalist and filmmaker Claude Lanzmann gathered first hand testimonials on the Holocaust from people who were there. Holocaust survivors, Polish neighbours and even from the Germans who ran the infrastructure (camps, trains, the ghettos). From this mountain of material, he pieced together this remarkable documentary.

It is a very authentic documentary in the sense that we hear the story told exactly like Lanzmann heard it. There is no filter, no re-enactment, no stock footage, no explanation of context beyond a few subtitles. This is simply a collection of testimonials. Lanzmann interviewing people and their answers.

And what testimonials they are! The stories told are the stuff of nightmares. It is experiencing the extermination of a people first hand. The industry of killing people, the horrors of sending people to their deaths and shovelling them first into mass graves and later into crematories. The Holocaust survivors are clearly damaged people and more than once they break down when they recollect their past.

As a collection of first-hand witnesses, this is a very important movie and my wife told me she learned a lot she did not know and so did I, though I have not watched through half the amount of Holocaust material she has. There is a nakedness here that makes this movie an experience I will never forget, though it conjured up images in my head that I would wish I could unsee. This is horror in its most undiluted form.

There is no doubt that “Shoah” is a commendable achievement in terms of material.

As a movie, though, it is a train wreck.

The price of giving us the first-hand experience of the interviews is that we witness everything. The pauses, the translations, the inconsequential questions, the roundabout answers. This is very slow going. There are interviews where it is difficult to see where they are going at all and the images used for variation, so we not always watch talking heads, are static panoramas, a vue across a landscape or the drive down a road. It reminded me of “Zu früh, zu spat” both for the laconic inaction and the lack of relevance to the spoken words. There are images from the camps, but they are present day (eighties) images and show very little but a lot of old trains.

The result is a movie that ought to be two to three hours long but clocks in at over nine hours. This works counter to the stories told in that as a viewer you get lost or bored and the imagery makes you lose interest. It is a very strange feeling to be listening to people talk about the death of thousands while you are fighting off sleep.

The interview technique of Lanzmann is also problematic. His interview style is not neutral but attempts to draw out the answers he is looking for. It is an aggressive style that frequently makes the interviewed look worse than they deserve or place them in uncomfortable situations they did not ask for. On several occasions he breaks his promise not to film the interview and when the interviewed breaks down he presses on until he gets the story he wants. Abraham Bomba is interviewed in his barbershop among clients and colleagues and rather than back off when Bomba clearly had enough, Lanzmann brutally makes him carry on.  Lanzmann clearly believes that the story is too important to be shy on his means.

It becomes very clear as we work through the interviews that the personal story of these people, how they themselves survived and what it did to them personally are very interesting stories in their own right, but Lanzmann clearly feels that such stories are just distractions from the larger picture. He may be right, on an academic level, but from a cinematic point of view this omission is almost criminal

The result is perhaps the most important movie ever made on the Holocaust but one I dearly wished had been made by a more competent filmmaker.

 

Vagabond (Sans Toit Ni Loi) (1985)

 

En pige på drift

What is the price of signing out of everything? My guess is this is not the question Agnes Varda, director and writer of “Vagabond” (“Sans toit loi”), wanted to ask, but my read on this movie is that it answers that question quite well.

At the opening of the movie, a dead body of a young woman is found in a ditch on a farm. The girl froze to death. We quickly learn that this girl, Mona (Sandrine Bonnaire), is the focus of the movie, so, yes, we know how the story ends. What follows is a journey through the last weeks of Mona’s life.

Mona left her life as a secretary to be a drifter and this is where we find her, wandering around the countryside of southern France in the winter. Mona has a number of encounters with other people which always end with Mona leaving. Invariably. There are many kinds of people and while their interactions with Mona vary, Mona always asks something from them, a ride, money, shelter, food or company and they always want something in return. A truck driver wants to talk, at the car workshop they want sex, Assoun, the farmhand, wants a friend, Landier, the forest professor, wants to help her and Yolande, the maid, wants a share in romance. When she meets a family of goat farmers, they tell her they have also signed out of society, but living like that is hard work and they offer a share in that with Mona.

Mona is happy to receive, but whenever it comes to give, she shuts down. There is no way anybody is getting anything from her. I fully understand her shutting down demands for sex, but saying no to friendship, care or help to help herself?

I suspect that the angle Varda was aiming for is how vulnerable Mona is and how she bravely defends herself from people who want to take advantage of her. In this light all the people she encounters are not really interested in her, but what she can do for them, even if it is just to make them feel better with themselves. Altruism in this light is aimed at oneself with no real interest for the person you are trying to help. True, several of the people Mona meets are selfish people and has a personal agenda and some of them are real creeps. But is that so entirely wrong, to have personal purpose to so something for another person? And frankly, some of those characters were genuinely good and decent people, so I do not agree with this reading.

The way I read it, Mona represents a type of person who wants to receive but never give, who never offer to invest anything, even to her own benefit if it means she has to commit, give or make an effort. For her any obstacle is resolved with refusal and escape. She is free, yes, nothing ties her down, but that life choice destroys her. The goatherder is perfectly right when he predicts this outcome. The price of disconnecting from society is that you must do everything on your own and that is very hard work.

Technically, Varda presents the movie almost like a documentary. From time to time, the characters Mona meets break the fourth wall and talk directly to the camera, about their choices and views. It seems odd, but it is also an interesting move and rather than making it more realistic, it gives the movie an almost fantastic element that makes this more of a fable than realism.

Agnes Varda made interesting movies in her career and some of them are on the List. While “Vagabond” won a lot of prices, I do not think it is one of her better movies. I think she wanted to drive an agenda with this movie, and I do not think she succeeded. At least not the way she intended.

 

Prizzi's Honor (1985)

 

Familiens ære

Gangster comedies is an odd sub-genre. Gangsters are a tough lot, brutal and trigger-happy while comedies are intended to be fun. Considered seriously, these two concepts match very poorly, yet there is an abundance of gangster comedies around. They require an uneasy balance, but when that balance is struck right, they can be excellent. “Prizzi’z Honor” aim for a darker humour, to an extent where I am not entirely certain I would call it a comedy anymore.

We meet Charley Partanna (Jack Nicholson) at a wedding in New York. This is a mafia wedding and Charley is a hitman for the Prizzi family. He is associated with the family through his father. At this wedding Charley spots a woman that immediately catches his interest. Through some research he manages to find her and it turns our that he and Irene (Kathleen Turner) has a lot in common and they immediately become a couple with the little issue that she lives in California. And is Polish, not Italian. And is a hitman too.

There is a complicated plot around a casino in Las Vegas belonging to the Prizzis getting swindled for a large sum of money. Charley is sent out to kill the perpetrator and retrieve the money, only to find out that the target is married to Irene. She is very apologetic, returns half the money and claims she was about to get a divorce anyway. All fine, Charley and Irene get married.

This suits Maerose Prizzi (Anjelica Huston very poorly. She used to have a relationship with Charley and still thinks she has a claim on him. She tells her father, Dominic Prizzi (Lee Richardson) that Charley took advantage of her before the wedding. This pisses off Dominic so he hires a hitman to take out Charley. The hitman is Irene.

Irene and Charley now work as a team, and they successfully kidnap a rich banker for the Prizzis in another complicated plot. Unfortunately, Irene shoots a police captain’s wife in the process and eventually the Prizzis, led by the old Don Corrado (William Hickey) decides Irene is a liability.

I got very confused in those convoluted schemes of the Prizzi family and while that likely made me miss key details, the bottom line was clear enough. Charley either belongs to the family or to Irene and therein lies both the comedy and the tragedy of the story. Is Charley a naive stooge being played both by the family and Irene? Or are Charley and Irene simply caught in a game they cannot control? Irene is certainly smart enough to understand that her situation is precarious, but does that makes her mercenary or careful?

From the helicopter perspective the setup is comedic. The Prizzis are so mafia cliché it almost hurts, the confusing schemes with hitmen turned on hitmen and people turning up at the wrong places. Yet, it is never overtly comedic, more played out as a natural consequence of circumstances.  These circumstances included that Charley and Irene met and fell in love.

Although Charley and Irene are both hitmen, and therefore morally on a big minus, it is difficult not to sympathize with them. Their care for each other seems quite genuine. That makes it the more painful to watch things unravel for them and the comedy sours. This turn is more tragic than comedic and this I guess is what makes it a dark comedy.

I must admit I never got entirely into the movie, but that is likely because mafia movies are not really my thing. Nicholson and Turner are both great in this movie. When are they not? Their presence in any movie is a big asset to the movie. William Hickey as the old Don Corrado Prizzi is also stellar, so I only blame the premise of “Prizzi’s Honor”. It was highly acclaimed though, with eight Academy nominations and one win (Anjelica Huston as Supporting Actress) and four Golden Globe wins.