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.

 

The Quiet Earth (1985)

 

The Quiet Earth

This is a curious little movie. “Little” I say because it is obviously made on a shoestring budget with clunky and cheap, though effective, special effects, but it also shows that you can get far, very far, on a good idea.

A man, Zac Hobson (Bruno Lawrence), wake up one morning like any other. He is alone. As he is getting to work, he realizes how alone he actually is. There is nobody at the gas station, nobody on the roads, just empty cars left at random. Zac is getting freaked out about it, but wherever he looks it seems that people have just been there and now they are gone.

Zac heads to a research station where he evidently works. We, very gradually, learn that he is a scientist involved with a project called “Flashlight”, to setup some sort of global energy grid to power everything and that it is this project that has evidently gone wrong.

Over the next few weeks, as Zac realizes how truly alone he is, he vacillates between enjoying himself being allowed to do anything he wants, and utter desperate depression and madness. Humans are social creatures and only when truly alone we realize that.

Eventually Zac encounters Joanne (Alison Routledge). Exhilarated that they are not alone, they set out to look for others and Zac starts to seriously look into the cause and effect of the “Effect” as they call the event that made everybody else disappear. Eventually, they also encounter Api (Pete Smith), a Māori who come across as a bit paranoid. They come to the conclusion that they all had just died when the Effect happened and this is why they are left. Zac finds out that the Effect will occur again at a certain time so they must blow up the research facility.

Watching “The Quiet Earth” as a science fiction story is both exciting and frustrating. Exciting because the sense of being left alone in an abandoned world is very powerful. Through dubbing, all external sounds have been removed, and everything looks as if it has just been deserted. A boiler still cooking, water tap still running and so one. People just... vanished. What do you do then? But it is also frustrating because as a science fiction plot, so much is left unexplained and cryptic in a very unsatisfying manner. Especially towards the end, instead of getting some sort of closure, we, the audience, are left with even more questions. Ultimately, I am left with the feeling that the science fiction plot is unimportant and is only there as a setting for the characters.

Accepting that, “The Quiet Earth” works very well. When Zac is alone, we explore how it feels to be completely alone. When he meets Joanne, we are presented with the question, what you would do if this other person was truly the only other man/woman in the world? What are the dynamics in that? And finally, having a third person come in, what does that do to the interpersonal dynamics? It is the old story of two men and one woman is one man too many. This is the true strength and real story of “The Quiet Earth” where the science fiction plot merely creates the stage for it to play out.

As mentioned in the header, working on a shoestring budget forces people to be inventive and creative and this is such a good example. All the good stuff in “The Quiet Earth” was made with more idea than money. A truck barring the road, a baby stroller left alone, or a boiler cooking dry are all simple, cheap but very effective effects. Keeping the cast down to three people is another way. The computer effects look awful, but then again, this is 1985, anything on a computer looked terrible.

Ultimately, this is an unsatisfying science fiction movie, but a very effective and successful study of human nature and that is of course the end purpose of science fiction.

 

Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985)

 

Edderkoppekvindens kys

Something special often happens when movies (and novels for that matter) narrow down. Reduce the number of characters and/or the set to a single or very few locations and it forces the movie to focus on the dialogue and the acting. Some of the most memorable movies have done exactly that to great effect. “Kiss of the Spiderwoman” is largely about two men sharing a prison cell, so we get a good opportunity here for something special.

The two men are Luis Molina (William Hurt) and Valentin Arregui (Raul Julia). They are in a Brazilian prison during a military dictatorship, Valetin because he is an opposition revolutionary (or just opposition, everybody in opposition is a revolutionary to a military dictatorship) and Luis because of homosexual advances on a minor (or just homosexual advances as that is often criminal enough to a right-wing authority).

The two are an unlikely match, but over the bulk of the movie they become friends, earning each other’s mutual respect. Luis keeps telling of an old movie, he loves, in great detail, a movie we then see while he talks and for nothing better to do Valentin listens. This movie takes place in Paris during the war, about a cabaret singer falling in love with a Gestapo officer.

For about 80% of the movie, this is all that happens. This is a slow burner and to me, it seemed to be repeating itself a number of times. Valentin gets tortured a bit, Luis tells some from his movie, some from his private life, a bit of arguing and back to the torture. I may have zoned out a few times because this part gets a bit blurry for me.

Then, with a jolt, we learn that Luis Molino was placed in the cell by the prison warden to gain information from Valentin, and that of course changes our perspective. Is he going to rat on his prison mate or have they become friends for real?

Let us is start with the positive. As mentioned in the opening, this format allows for great acting, and this is what we get. William Hurt as the homosexual Luis Molina, is exceptional. The movie appears to have some status in the gay community, and this is largely down to Hurt and his multi-dimensional portrayal of the openly gay Molina. It earned him an Academy award. Raul Julia is less spectacular, but his job is also mainly to play up against Hurt and that he does sufficiently well.

We also get an interesting ending, with some important decisions on Luis Molina’s part. It feels a bit like a swan song, but it is delicate enough to work.

What does not work, at least not for me, is the humming through the first hour and a half. The movie seems to go nowhere, and I had serious problems paying attention. Not for lack of acting, but for lack of story. This is supposed to be the core of the movie, but I have problems even recalling what happened in this part. There may be a progress in their relationship, we may be learning a lot about Molina, but the pacing is glacial. If I had not been committed to watch the movie, I would likely have simply stopped watching after an hour. Instead, I stopped every time I felt I was dozing off, to continue when my head was clearer.

“Kiss of a Spider Woman” was made for the theatre and that shows. It has that “kammerspiel” property, but in this case it also becomes a constraint for the movie rather than an asset. The scenes of Molina’s stories break the prison and although they serve as an analogy for what is happening in the cell, they also feel as that much filler. An escape from the constraint of the format.

This is not a movie I feel inclined to watch again, but for a single watching it is worth experiencing William Hurt go all in as the effeminate Luis Molina. I can also imagine this is an important movie in the gay community. There are not that many movies that include homosexuality as more than a stereotype.

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985)

 

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters

There are hard to find movies and then there are really hard to find movies. I had almost given up finding “Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters”, which would make it the first, but finally, on a dodgy streaming service, hiding under being a trailer (at 2 hours...) I found it. I honestly do not mind paying for the movies I watch, and it pisses me off that I have to go to such extremes to watch something. At least the site did not insist on showing me advertisement for porn.

There is a rule of thumb on the List that that movies that are hard to find have disappeared for a reason, read: not worth watching. Luckily, we are not there. “Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters” is an interesting movie and certainly a different movie, but it is not an easy movie.

“Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters” is a biopic, but quite unlike any biopic I have ever watched. Yukio Mishima was an author and playwright who was active from the forties until 1970 where his career ended most spectacularly. The biopic focuses on the essential theme in both Mishima’s writing and his life. A theme that hails the values and aesthetics of the samurai caste. The purity, the sacrifice, the stoicism and the idea of the glorious death.

While the movie takes us from his childhood to the fatal day in 1970, it also takes us on a tour through this world of Mishima, illustrated by enactments of some of his plays. While I do not understand all these plays are trying to tell, it is clear that they say a lot about Mishima, the way he thought and the message he tried to raise in his writings.

This all culminates in the fourth chapter, which is not a play, but Mishima (Ken Ogata) trying to convert his words into action, fiction into reality. In this enactment, he and some of his students take over an army base, proclaim their traditionalistic and militaristic program in an attempt to start a coup and then kill themselves, Mishima famously committing seppuku.

This format is better felt than understood and better to watch than explain. It is immersive, but also oblique because it does not explain anything. Even the narration (by Roy Scheider) is poetic rather than explanatory, enforcing the sense of experiencing Mishima rather than understanding him.

While this all takes place in Japan with a Japanese cast, it is more of an American production, with Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas as executive producers and direction by Paul Schrader of “Taxi Driver” fame. I understand that the official Japan has an issue with Mishima and hence this film and sees him as an embarrassment and maybe he is, but as he is presented in the movie he also represents an idea and aesthetic that is very much Japanese. I guess there is ambiguity in that.

As a biopic I found it very interesting because it never tries to reduce the person portrayed to something we, mere mortals, can comprehend, but tries, for better or worse to show us what made him special. A very difficult art that most biopics miss. For that alone this is worth watching, even if you get lost in everything else.

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.

My Life as a Dog (Mitt liv som hund) (1985)

 

Mit liv som hund

Before director Lasse Hallström became an accomplished, if not famous, Hollywood director, he worked in Sweden, primarily doing videos for ABBA, but in 1985 he directed “My Life as a Dog” (“Mitt liv som hund), which became an international hit. “My Life as a Dog” is a special entry on the Danish “1001” list.

In the late fifties, Ingemar (Anton Glanzelius) is a boy of around 10 years with a single mother (the father is absent) and an older brother. The mother (Anki Lidén) is very ill and mostly in bed and Ingemar’s life revolves around attention to his sick mother and his beloved dog. When her illness takes a turn for the worse, Ingemar is sent to his uncle and aunt (Tomas von Brömssen as Gunnar and Kicki Rundgren as Ulla) in a small town in Småland. Ingemar gets to know a lot of the locals there, like the tomboy Saga (Melinda Kinnaman), the village beauty Berit (Ing-Marie Carlsson) and bed-ridden old Mr. Arvidsson (Didrik Gustafsson) to whom he read aloud advertisements for women’s underwear.

Eventually, Ingemar returns to his mother, but she soon dies and Ingemar is sent back to his uncle and aunt. He learns his dog has also died and the combined loss threatens to send him over the edge.

Throughout the movie, Ingemar does and says things that are mildly disturbing. Often unintentionally, it drives his mother nuts, and he gets a reputation for being strange. In the little town in Småland, he starts on a blank sheet where everybody is a bit odd. This makes him open up and make friends. When he becomes the object of a triangle drama with Saga and another girl he reverts to his strangeness and acts like a dog, but even that is somehow dealt with and leads to a catharsis moment where he finally gets to face and process his grief.

It seems to me that the title refers to how Ingemar sees his life as that of a dog. Both in the sense that he has to accept that focus is on somebody else, and he has to do something wild to get some attention and that the life as a dog is a lot simpler. As a dog there is no responsibility, no decisions and no expectations. This is both something he experiences and aspires to when things are difficult. Facing life and grief requires maturity and courage and this is his coming of age.

There is a sweet sub-plot around Saga who is unhappy being a girl. She likes boxing and football and is concerned that eventually her growing into a woman will prevent her from doing these things. For her there is also a coming-of-age process where she must accept who she is and is becoming and admit to herself her feelings. When we see her in the end in a dress, soiled with mud, it indicates how she has embraced both aspects of herself.

As most Swedish movies “My Life as a Dog” moves along in a slower pace than we are used to and at the same time, Ingemar’s strangeness is like an accident or disaster waiting to happen. This combines to give the movie a feeling of impending doom in slow motion, which I suppose serve well as an analogue to Ingemar’s feelings, but also makes the movie a bit difficult to watch.

In the end we learn that Ingemar is convinced that he is the one to blame, that he caused his mother’s death and implicitly that he is somehow in control of bad things that happen. Finding out that things happen that you cannot control and that you, as a child, are not guilty of, is part of his growing up.

Frankly, while I watched “My Life as a Dog” I did not like it much. The feeling of impending doom made it difficult. Afterwards, however, I am a lot more positive about it when I think of it. There is something in the message that is really comforting and seeing all these odd characters getting along is heartwarming. Therefore, a modest recommendation from me.

 

Come and See (Idi i Smotri) (1985)

 

Gå og se

The are difficult movies, there are tough to watch movies and then there is “Come and See” (“Idi i Smotri). I suspect the intension was to convince the viewer of the horrors in Belarus during the Second World War and, yes, thank you, I am now very convinced.

Fliora (Aleksei Kravchenko) is a boy, maybe 13 or 14 years old, who is drafted by partisans in 1943, much against his mothers wishes. He is set to do drudgery and left behind with a girl, Glasha (Olga Mironova) when the partisans move on. Glasha and Fliora are bombed and narrowly escape a German paratrooper attack. They go to Fliora’s village, only to find everybody killed in a pile. Fliora knows of a hideout in the swamp, but rather than finding his family, he finds a lot of other starving villagers.

Fliora and three others set out to find food. Two of them are blown up in a minefield and the third is killed by Germans when they try to spirit away a cow. The cow dies too. Fliora narrowly escapes the firefight, but is surprised by the Germans when he tries to requisition horse and cart to bring the dead cow back. The owner of the cart hides him in his home, but that almost gets Fliora caught when SS gathers the entire village in the community hall and sets in on fire.

All this, sounding so trivial in a summary, are presented in all the horrific details, always with an increasingly broken Fliora at the centre. There is a step up in horror through the sequences, so just when you thought it could not get worse, it just does, by about an order of magnitude. For the final destruction of the village, I could only watch this with half an eye, while I tried to distract myself with something else. Otherwise, I would have gotten physically sick. I can only imagine how it would have been to watch this in a cinema (which, reputedly, required an ambulance outside to take sick people away from the cinema).

Kravchenko, as the boy, exposed to all this horror is a study in the effect this have on an impressionable young human being. All innocence is ripped out of him, everything he loves is taken away from him and destroyed and you see it in his face. While it is terrible to look at (suffering children is my personal limit), I cannot help being impressed with this acting effort.

As any movie coming out of the Soviet Union, the movie has a purpose and, in this case, it feeds into the national story of the violation done to Russians (and Byelorussians by extension) during the war. It is very convincing at that, and it cannot even be blamed for exaggeration. In all likelihood, reality was probably even worse. What is interesting is what it choses to show and what is not presented. We see villagers and peasants rounded up and killed and those who escape are fighting it out as partisan, heroically. The few we see who are not peasants, are suspected as or are outright collaborators of the Germans. We see no suffering Jews and no suffering intellectuals. There is a monopolization of the suffering by those that represents the regime.

Today, the suffering of the Russians during the Second World War is still playing a huge role in the Russian mythology and is frequently referred to as an argument for the Ukraine invasion, which is really odd, considering the reversal of the roles (Kravchenko is actually banned from entering Ukraine). A movie like “Come and See” ought to convince anybody that invading other people’s country is a very bad idea and considering the local undesirables as animals that can be destroyed is something to be abhorred. But I guess you can read different meanings into this.

There is no doubt “Come and See” is an impressive and effective movie, and while it probably ought to be watched, it is not an experience I wish on anybody. It will take me some time to recover from the brutality of the scenes in this movie.