Platoon (1986)

 

Platoon

There was a period where Oliver Stone could do nothing wrong. “Platoon” was one of the highlights of that period. It was highly acclaimed by both critics and the public, but I have not watched it since those days in the eighties. To say that I have been trying to avoid it is probably too strong a wording, but I have just not been inclined to revisit this depressing bloodbath.

It is 1967 (we are not told, I think, but Wikipedia says so) and Chris Taylor (Charlie Sheen) is arriving in Vietnam as an inexperienced rookie. Taylor is a volunteer who dropped out of college to join the infantry. New arrivals tend to die fast, so Taylor must learn the hard way to stay alive. It is brutal, dirty and distressing to say the least. Death is everywhere and if not that then rain, snakes, leeches and disease.

It is clear early on that the lieutenant (Mark Moses) is in charge of jack while the true platoon commanders are the sergeants Barnes (Tom Berenger and Elias (Willem Dafoe). Both are highly skilled and professional, the difference being that Barnes has succumbed to the brutality of the war while Elias has retained his humanity. This difference comes to a head when searching a village suspected of supporting the Vietcong. When they do find hidden weapons, parts of the platoon, led by Barnes, treat the villagers, women, children, all, as combatants and go on a killing rampage, while Elias tries to stop it. This splits the platoon in two halves, following either Barnes or Elias with Taylor clearly on Elias side. Since what Barnes and his group did was clearly illegal, murder between the two groups is in the air.

So, while the unit fights an almost invisible, but terrifying, enemy for reasons that are never discussed, the real war appears to be between the two fractions in the platoon. Humanity versus inhumanity.

That is also what I found was the larger message with the movie. It was never a war movie about conquering or even defend against an evil enemy. It is a movie about what a brutal war like the Vietnam war does to regular people. In this sense it leans up against “Apocalypse Now”, but avoid the Odyssean (or Orphean) references. The journey into hell is the human transformation, the loss of what makes us human. In this respect, Elias becomes a Christ figure, sacrificed to save the souls of his followers.

It follows from his analysis that the reasons for going to war in the end means little to those on the ground. The only higher purposes left is to stay alive and/or preserve their humanity, with the later being the first to go. This is not unique for the Vietnam war. It is my understanding this is relevant for any war with substantial fighting, whether it be WWI or Ukraine.

If you miss out on the above, the plot of the movie may feel thin. Shooting, marching, smoking, more shooting... Post-watching, it is difficult to discern the steps the movie follows, except this gradual decent into the hell of inhumanity. That does not mean it is uninteresting to watch. Stone never falls into the trap of sacrificing the movie to the underlying message. It is riveting to follow, not least because of the constant danger and tension, but also because it is technically an excellent movie on all accounts, from script and acting to cinematography and editing. Even the soundtrack is spot on. Classical music is not what you would associate the Vietnam War with, but the transcendental function of the music to lead us into hell is used to perfection.

Willem Dafoe is for some obscure reason a big thing for Gen Z according to my son, despite him being a very different generation. It was curious to see that even in 86 he looked old and worn. Tom Berenger always looks tough, but I think he takes the price in “Platoon”. That man is a demon.

“Platoon” is not a movie I enjoy watching, and I would be suspicious of anybody who do, but it is a high-quality movie that brings something important to the table and that makes it a must-see, even if it is just that one time. For me, I can wait another few decades watching this again.

Children of a Lesser God (1986)

 

Kærlighed uden ord

We are staying with a romantic drama, but compared to last weeks “A room with a View”, we are at the other end of the scale. This was not really my jam.

James Leeds (William Hunt) starts working as a teacher on a school for the deaf and severely hearing impaired. His speciality is teaching the deaf to speak... I will let that stand for a moment. James is a very involved teacher who gets very close to his students. One of his students is Sarah Norman (Marlee Matlin) who technically is not a student, but a former pupil, now janitor, on the school and technically not his student because she is not interested in learning to speak.

None of this seems to deter James. He is romantically interested in Sarah and through persistence he manages to wear down enough of her defences to get into her pants. James is a man with a mission. He sees Sarah as a bright girl who just needs to be able to speak to be able to fulfil her potential which goes beyond cleaning the floors of the school. This is the one item where Sarah holds her ground. She sees absolutely no reason to learn to speak and, in fact, find it problematic that she needs to accommodate him rather than he meet her in her world of silence. The crisis in the movie is that this argument comes to a head and Sarah leaves James.

I think my problem with “Children of a Lesser God” primarily is that if you take away that most of the characters are deaf and communicate in sign language, this is a very trivial romantic drama, essentially a Hallmark mass produced item. There is not that much at stake and there is only a crisis because of bull-headed insistence. In this respect there was a lot more meat on “A Room with a View”. A second reason is that the character of James Leeds is problematic on three accounts. He starts a relationship with a student, never mind she is technically an employee, but she is still his student. That is a major no-go in my book and frankly creepy. Secondly, he is stalking her and pushing her rather than respecting her rejections. We are supposed to see his interest as a good thing, to help her, but to me, he is coming on way too hard. Getting that treatment from a teacher or colleague is unacceptable. Thirdly, everything happens on James’ terms. It is his projects, his goals, his world which is the right one. If you at any moment was in doubt of that, observing him at the deaf party of Sarah’s friends was very convincing. He could not accept her being happy if it was not on his terms.

Not everything is bad though. Both Hurt and Matlin deliver extraordinary performances (Matlin got herself an Academy Award for this) and having so many of the deaf in significant roles was definitely a positive. Matlin herself is almost entirely deaf and has made a career out of playing deaf roles. Unfortunately, the movie dares not take us all the way into the world of the deaf. All conversations in sign language are spoken out in plain language by the receiver, which is something I doubt would happen in reality and is frankly disturbing. What would have been interesting was if the deaf had been communicating entirely in sign language and we get the silence and a translation through subtitles. That would make us experience their world and elevate them to equal partners to the hearing. Instead, as the title hints at, the constant translation to spoken language makes them into deficient beings. This would of course have required that the audience would have to READ while watching, oh horror.

Maybe it is a period thing, the eighties are far away, but “Children of a Lesser God” comes across as a missed opportunity. For a movie trying to present the hearing impaired as fully equal to the rest of us with emphasis on accept, it falls short and often gives the opposite impression. Insisting that the deaf speak despite their humiliation, refusing to let their language stand alone and elevating a character to hero status who wants to mould them into an inferior version of the hearing. On top, to wrap this “message” into an insipid and trivial romance with the outcome telegraphed to not the deaf but the mentally impaired.

I love the deaf characters, but the movie is terrible.

  

A Room with a View (1986)

 

Et værelse med udsigt

There are many interesting benefits from following a curated list. For me, the best is that I get to see (or read on my book blog) material, I would never otherwise have watched and sometimes it moves my idea of what my preferences are or should be. One such movie is “A Room with a View”.

It is very early twentieth century, and we find the young Lucy Honeychurch (Helena Bonham Carter) and her chaperone Charlotte (Maggie Smith) in Florence. Lucy is a tourist and has booked a room at a pension run by an Englishwoman and catering to English visitors. Greatly disappointed with the lack of a view, they are offered the room of the Emersons, father (Denholm Elliott) and son (Julian Sands), bringing them into contact. Lucy is very much the correct and stiff Victorian gentlewoman, but Florence has a troubling effect on her. George Emerson, raised as a free spirit, fascinates and scares the virginal Lucy and when he dares to kiss her on an outing, Lucy and Charlotte immediately leave, never to tell anybody about this terrible breach of decency. Except Charlotte apparently told Eleanor Lavish (Judi Dench), a novelist, about the incident.

Back in England, Lucy is courted by the arrogant and bookish Cecil Vyse (Daniel Day-Lewis). She accepts his marriage proposal, but then the Emersons move into a nearby cottage and that opens a path for Lucy she thought had been long shut down. With Simon Callow as the insightful vicar Mr. Beebe.

The story itself is not particularly new. The repressed woman, keeping herself in a tight control dictated by social conventions, who meets somebody who helps her liberate herself to be the person she actually is. If you have watched “Titanic”, you know exactly what I mean. The special thing about “A Room with a View” is how elegantly it is done. There is that dash of comedy to keep it lively, that sense of who the characters are that makes them come alive as real people and just enough drama to feel something is at stake. There is never any doubt of the outcome, it can be predicted ten minutes in, but it is a joy to see it unfold.

That the characters are as fleshed out as they are, has of course a lot to do with the script, but I dare say that having quality actors in not just the key roles, but also in practically all supporting roles is definitely a factor. I mean, Judi Dench as the writer and Maggie Smith as the chaperone! A lot rests on Helena Bonham Carter as Lucy, and she turns out to be a lot more than just a pretty face. There is a fire in the character, but under very tight control. Her hair is a metaphor of her state. Wrapped tight in a braid or in a disciplined hairdo signal tight control but letting her hair out means she is letting go of that control. Something her surroundings are not keen on letting her do. The wilder her hair, the more she blossoms, even if it is because she is upset. It is then a liberating anger.

Daniel Day-Lewis’s Cecil Vyse is the villain in the sense that he represents the golden prison Lucy is about to walk into, but also because he comes about as both arrogant and mean. We are supposed to not like him. I am not as dismissive of him though. More than anything he is misplaced and entirely the wrong match for Lucy. In a sense, he is in as much need of liberation as her, he just does not know it. Or maybe he does near the end. He is socially clumsy and inept and masks it with arrogance. I actually feel sorry for him.

If there is a problem with “A Room view a View”, it is that as a novel being squeezed into a movie, there is a sense a lot of material missing. Especially George Emerson is not nearly enough fleshed out. There is a strong hint that there is a major story here, but that it simply did not make the cut and that makes him a bit like the prince in Snow White, not quite, but almost a non-entity.  

“A Room with a View” is a period piece in the romantic genre and almost the definition of a movie I would skip, but that would be a shame. It is actually a delightful movie.

 

Down by Law (1986)

Down by Law

You know going into a Jim Jarmusch movie that the experience will be different form the standard Hollywood fare and you know that you will spend the next few days contemplating what exactly you have just watched. “Down by Law” is no different and as this was a first-time watch for me, I am not at all done wondering what this was all about.

Somewhere in the New Orleans area, we meet Zack (Tom Waits) and Jack (John Lurie). Zack is an out of luck disk jockey whose (very pretty) girlfriend is leaving him in the opening scenes. In a drunken stupor he accepts a job to drive a car from one end of town to the other, not knowing there is a dead body in the trunk. Zack is busted and sent to prison just like that.

Jack is a pimp who is lured to meet a new girl who turns out to be a child. Too late he learns he has been set up and he is busted too.

Zack and Jack end up cell mates and are eventually joined by Roberto (Roberto Benigni), a tourist who threw back a billiard ball when attacked and accidentally killed one of his attackers.

We follow their interaction in the cell. They escape and then we follow them in the swamps.

The big question of what this is all about is still lost on me. All three are framed, but the court events are omitted. As is the actual escape. They talk about escaping and in the next scene they are on the run. For a prison break movie, those are two very curious omissions. Instead, we get long scenes where they are playing cards, arguing or just doing nothing. Except Roberto is never quiet.

The closest thing to a theme I have gotten to, is the developing relationship between the three of them, particularly seen from the points of view of Zack and Jack. They are both loners, who need nothing from other people and have trouble socializing. They see each other as enemies but are actually quite alike. Only as we approach the end, they seem to realize that, but it is very difficult for them to admit that what they have in front of them is their soul brother. That in fact, they are not alone. Roberto is almost the opposite. He very easily socializes, do not judge anybody and looks for opportunities instead of obstacles. He is not smart, but he does not need to be with those traits. He is the glue that keeps the team together and make things happen. Almost as some divine intervention.

Just like “Stranger than fiction”, “Down by Law” is filmed in black and white and gives the feel of taking place in some sub-reality that is similar to the real world, but eerily disconnected from it. This has the effect of taking the characters out of a real-world context and making their world very small and unpopulated. We see only the other cells in a single glimpse; we see only their connection to the outside world as sort of goodbye scenes and I could even believe that the prison and escape is meant as some religious purgatory leading to a rebirth.

Tom Waits I only know as a musician, but it turns out he has a massive resume as an actor and here I learned why. He is very convincing. Luckily, we get a few of his songs too. Benigni is a polarizing character. His arm-waving kind of over-the-top Italian comedy usually sits poorly with me, but somehow it worked perfectly in this movie. It must be that the character begs this sort of acting or that the two other characters were constantly trying to put a lid on it.

Did I like the movie? Well, based on the above, it is hard to say I did not, but it took me an awful long time to get into it and most of it, I only like in retrospect. I frankly admit that, especially during the first hour, i was often bored and had some trouble maintaining attention. My wife checked out after 10 minutes, but my persistence paid off and I think it redeemed itself towards the end. Probably mostly for Jarmusch fans, but a tempered recommendation from me.

 

  

Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986)

 

En vild pjækkedag

Here is another eighties movie that goes way back for me and one I am very torn about. Parts of me enjoy watching it immensely and other parts despise the movie as abhorrent.

Ferris Bueller (Matthew Broderick) is a senior year high school student, living in upper middle-class suburbia (or is it lower upper class?). Frequently he skips school and is in fact an expert on the topic. He convinces his parent he is sick and has a whole string of fall backs set up just in case such as snoring sounds from his room, an answering machine at the front door and a back story for the school. He even knows how to enter the school computer to reduce his record of missed classes.

Ferris wants to do fun stuff with his girlfriend, Sloane (Mia Sara) and for that he needs a car and therefore his “friend”, Cameron (Alan Ruck), who has called in sick for real. Despite Cameron’s protests he comes over and they spring Sloane from class, pretending to be her father and that her grand mother has died. He also bullies Cameron into letting him take Cameron’s father’s beloved vintage Ferrari for them to drive to nearby Chicago to do “fun” stuff, like eating in a fancy restaurant, go to a baseball game and join a parade.

Meanwhile, Ferris’ sister, Jeanie (Jennifer Grey) is upset that nobody can see through Ferris scams, the student body is convinced that Ferris is mortally ill and are running a “Save Ferris” campaign and the school principal, Ed Rooney (Jeffrey Jones), smells a rat and wants to expose Ferris so badly that he will literally go to extremes to nail him.

I understand that the point of the story is that it is a good thing to break the rules, to take initiative and ignore authorities. The youth rebellion story that this is what coming of age is. Doing what is expected of you is to follow boring, useless classes and being under the thumb of dominating parents, in other words, missing life. In this light, Ferris is successfully turning his back on the system and striking out on his own and if you accept the premise, his adventure is a lot of fun.

The problem is that this premise is seriously flawed. Ferris needs the school, he needs his parents and there are consequences to his actions, at least in real life. Ferris’ concerns are for his own gratification and what he does to Cameron to get that gratification is so beyond the acceptable. He knows Cameron is suffering from a very dominating father, he knows that taking his Ferrari will land Cameron, not Ferris, in very hot water and he hears again and again Cameron plead with him to not do this, yet Ferris persists because he wants to have fun. He even invents reasons that this is good for Cameron, but I cannot see how in any way this will do him any good. That Cameron somehow is learning to stand up for himself will only last until he encounters his father because like Ferris, Cameron also needs both family and school.

We are also supposed to laugh at or mock all those who cannot accept that Ferris can get away with things other people cannot. The sister learns that she can accept that other people can get away with things she cannot, and the school principal is the butt of most of the jokes for not accepting that Ferris is beyond the rules everybody else live under. Again, many will agree that this is small people’s thinking and admire Ferris, but I find it deeply problematic.

Jeffrey Jones’ Principal Rooney is by far the funniest character of the movie. Regardless of whether it is acceptable or not what Ferris is doing, that man is completely of the rails in his vendetta against Ferris Bueller. His efforts are comical and ultimately futile, and Jones makes the very best out of that role. Had he been a more balanced person I would have wished him good hunting in nailing Ferris, but for a character this zealous it is difficult to be on his side and that is actually a shame because he is the only one really standing in the way of Ferris getting away with his stunt.

I do not like Ferris, and I do not like the message of the movie, and I have difficulty bending my mindset into accepting the premise of the movie, but I also, grudgingly, must admit that it is a movie that makes me laugh. The ending with Rooney being picked up by the school bus is simply outstanding. So, yes, very torn on this one.

       

Aliens (1986)

 

Aliens

It is not often that sequels are as good as the movie that started the franchise. “Aliens” is one of those few movies. Director James Cameron made the smart choice to make a very different movie from the original “Alien” and doing it so well that it does not need to stand in the shadow of the original.

Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is rescued from her escape pod after 57 years of drifting in space. Everything she had is gone and she learns that the planet they found the xenomorph on has now been colonized. Nobody seem to believe her story, but when contact is lost with the colony, Ripley is asked to join the team as a consultant. Her liaison with the Company, Burke (Paul Reiser), a total deucebag, is to join the mission together with a detachment of badass space marines.

The team quickly learns that the colony has indeed been overrun by the xenomorph and this time there are a lot of them. The colonists are all gathered in the alien nest as incubators and the attempt at rescuing them is... well, the marines are getting their asses kicked and Ripley must take charge. The mission is now to get off the planet alive and nuke the critters.

Where “Alien” was a confined space horror movie with the monster lurking in the shadows, “Aliens” is all out war. It is an action movie against an enemy you actually see, but who is so scary and powerful that even the best humankind can send against them are ants to be crushed. There is a feeling of payback time, that the fight is brought to the xenomorphs, but this feeling quickly evaporates, and it becomes an escape room story instead and the enemy is not just the critters but within.

The colony is not the Nostromo, but it is every bit as dark and gritty, just differently from the spaceship. In this case it is the infestation of the xenomorph that has made this a very hostile environment and turned what should be homely living quarters into a death trap. Cameron picked up on the vibe from “Alien” and is true to it, yet he transmutes it into something new. The colony is every bit as claustrophobic as Nostromo.

As children we all had our favourite among the marines. Hicks (Michael Biehn) is an easy choice because he does the right things, but Vasquez (Jenette Goldstein) is probably the most badass marine in movie history and Bishop (Lance Henriksen) is one cool android or synthetic human. Yet, when the shit hits the fan, Ripley steps into character. In ”Alien” it was her resourcefulness that made her prevail. In “Aliens” she is armed to the teeth and totally badass. Sigourney Weaver solidified her claim to the title as the greatest female action hero around. Something that often has made it difficult to watch her in other roles. In “Ghostbuster” I always thought that Zuul made a bad choice choosing the fridge of ELLEN RIPLEY – Badass Superior.

I have watched this movie many times. Probably even more times than the original “Alien”. This time I watched the Special Edition with enough extra material to clock in at 147 minutes, just to add a little extra to the experience.

The Special edition includes scenes from the colony before the infestation including some backstory to the sole survivor, the child Newt (Carrie Henn). I can see why it is interesting to include it, but I can also see why eventually it was removed. The added action scenes however felt natural and as if they had been there all the time. You just cannot get enough of blasting xenomorphs.

James Cameron lifted the job of making a sequel to “Alien” to perfection and even today it does not feel dated at all. It is the sci-fi action movie that all other attempts into that genre must measure up against and to my knowledge few has come close, even within the franchise.

This is awesome stuff.  

 

The Fly (1986)

 

Fluen

With David Cronenberg at the helm, you know you have entered the land of body horror movies, and there is probably none more iconic than “The Fly”. The transformation from man to... something unspeakable... aborted my earlier attempts at watching this back in the nineties, so while I have watched the first part a few times, this was a first for completing it.

Ronnie Quaile (Geena Davis), a journalist, and Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) meet at a social event. Seth is socially awkward but keen to make an impression on the pretty journalist, so he invites her home to his lab/apartment to show her his invention: Two teleportation pods.

They fall in love, and she documents his progress getting the machines to work on living things, something that has in the past not worked so well. Just at the machine is ready Seth is overcome with jealously and alcohol when Ronnie goes to see her former boyfriend/boss. He decides to test the telepods on himself... and is successful. Except, he was not alone in the pod. A fly had entered the pod and merged with him upon recreation.

While Seth is at first feeling invigorated, the fly part of him eventually starts to manifest itself and Seth is turning into an entirely new creature, a Brundlefly. Needless to say, this causes some strain on the relationship between Seth and Ronnie.

This is a movie with a lot of flaws in the plot and the script. There were several times where I was wondering how many times they read through the script before starting filming. How exactly was it that Davis’ character developed so solid a relationship with Goldblum’s character in so short a time that she kept coming back to him as he was transformed at the risk of her life? How was it that teaching the computer about the poetry of flesh would stop it turning living things inside out? Or what about the million microbial lifeforms also riding along with human beings? Should they not be fused into the primary creature as well?

All this is sort of irrelevant because this is not why you watch “The Fly”. You see it because Jeff Goldblum is turning into some strange fusion of human and fly and that is done with emphasis on all the gory details. I cannot think of a more explicit and scary transformation in movie history, though my experience on body horror is a bit limited, and it is all done without CGI. Even those early phases where weird hairs start to grow from his back or he is experiencing these strange bursts of energy and strength, are scary. But it gets so much worse. Things coming out of his nails, his ears are coming off, he vomits acids to digest food externally before sucking it in and all the while his behaviour is getting increasingly excentric.

Even today, this was a tough ride for me. This is disgusting and fascinating in equal measure, a slowly unfolding disaster, a nightmare playing out right before our eyes. “The Fly” won the Academy Award for Best Makeup and that was one of most deserved wins in the history of the awards.

The rest of the movie has a nice wrapping too. Davis and Goldblum are excellent actors who gets the most out of a mediocre script (they were a couple at the time) and Howard Shore did a nice soundtrack. It just does not change that the one thing you think about when they movie is done is that horrid creature Seth Brundle becomes. For this, “The Fly” is movie history and this is classic David Cronenberg.

It is also why this is a must-see movie, but not right after dinner. Not if you like to keep your meal on the inside.

The Name of the Rose (1986)

 

Off-List: The Name of the Rose

The third off-List movie of 1986 is “The Name of the Rose”. The is a movie I remember watching and liking back in the nineties, based on a book by Umberto Eco that I also liked tremendously. I do not remember which I experienced first. To me the two memories have blurred together and that to me is a sign of a successful adaptation.

It is the year 1327 (before the great plague) and church people of several orders a meeting at a renowned but remote monastery in the mountains of Italy. The point of the meeting is to discuss what sounds like a trivial detail, but something these church people find tremendously important. One of the visitors is William of Baskerville (Sean Connery), a Franciscan monk with a novice, Adso (Chistian Slater), the narrator, in tow. William has a reputation for solving mysteries so when monks are mysteriously dying in the monastery, the Abbot (Michael Lonsdale) asks William for his help, especially as the timing with illustrious visitors coming, is not so great.

William is indeed quite the detective and by applying logic, observation and what went for science in those days, he is making progress. He is not helped, though, by the fact that the deaths seem to be following the prophecy of the end of the world and that voices in the monastery, especially the old, blind monk Jorge (Feodor Chaliapin Jr.), are busy calling it the work of the devil or God’s punishment. Things are not getting easier when the inquisition arrives in the form of Bernardo Gui (F. Murray Abraham), an old enemy of William and a man good at finding easy and convenient solutions with the help of torture and superstition.

The clues are leading William to the secret library of the monastery. It is hidden inside a labyrinth in a colossal tower. There is a book here that seems to kill and William is set on finding the answers despite the opposition he is facing. While Bernardo Gui is busy burning heretics and witches, William and Adso are fighting for their lives in the tower.

It is possible to reduce “The Name of the Rose” to a detective story and it would still be an exciting one. William of Baskerville is a hint at both William of Occam (Occams razor!) and Sherlock Holmes. Add some James Bond and some gory murders and we are pretty much home.

But this is so much more. There is a lot of authenticity in the sets and the environment and for a history buff like me this is first rate. This is dirty and grimy and with a sense of detail that feels real. Not the Hollywood interpretation of medieval times, but the ugly reality of actually going back there.

Mostly, though, “The Name of the Rose” introduces to us some of that religious idiocy that was so pervading in those times. William’s deductive methods are completely at odds with the church tyranny of Bernardo Gui. The sentiment that knowledge should only be preserved, not developed and that some knowledge is too dangerous because it might challenge church authority are so symptomatic of the infallibility of religion and the sway the Catholic church had over people of the time. It is not terribly different from other totalitarian systems throughout history, but sometimes you need to see it play out in a remote historical setting to really appreciate the scope and consequence of it. It is horrific and unfair, it is a power play and it is a lose-lose situation in which the individual is powerless. The peasants are depicted as dirty brutes, wallowing in their pigsties of hut, never speaking but in grunts. It is the perfect picture of how the monks in their arrogance are looking down on the peasants and demonstrate perfectly their hypocrisy when they themselves are squealing around like headless chicken in the face of the threat of the devil among them.

It is quite clear what the position of the movie is on the church, and this is also how I remember Umberto Eco’s book. Yet there is this love of the detail, of the achievements of the monasteries and the culture they did represent without which this story would never have been made.

This is a clever movie that requires something of its audience and gives back so much. There is an intellectual element here that makes this a rewarding but also frightening experience to watch. Dogma is dangerous at any time, but especially religious dogma when religion has the power to enforce its will.

Needless to say, this is still a fantastic movie and one that has not lost a step since 1986. I am surprised to not find it on the List, it really does belong there and at least I can include it on mine.

The Decline of the American Empire (Declin de l'Empire Americaine) (1986)

 

Generationen der blev væk

It took me quite a while to wrap my head around “Le Déclin de l'empire Américain”. Not that I did not understand what was happening and I did find it funny, but the big why was eluding me. I may have come closer, but it is just possible it is one of those movies you respond to without knowing exactly why.

On a summer day outside Montreal, we are following two groups. The men, Remy (Rémy Girard), Pierre (Pierre Curzi), Claude (Yves Jacques) and Alain (Daniel Brière) are preparing a dinner party at the home of Remy while the women, Dominique (Dominique Michel), Louise (Dorothée Berryman), Diane (Louise Portal) and Danielle (Geneviève Rioux) are at the gym.

All eight are associated with the university, mostly on the faculty and all of them consider each other friends. With two exceptions, they are rapidly approaching middle age.

For the bulk of the movie, we listen to the conversations of the two groups, which in both cases revolves around a single topic: Sex. Most of them seem happy to share their philandering which covers every variation under the sun. Remy and Pierre stand out for having an entire industry of affairs, including within the friend group, with the only difference that Remy is married (to Louise).

As the stories are told, we see them in flashbacks and it is clear that many of the women’s stories feature Remy, though nobody tell Louise. She knows he has something going when he is travelling, but is certain she is enough for him when he is in town. That does not prevent her from having affairs though.

Claude is homosexual, but not particularly different and Danielle actually work as a prostitute next to her history studies.

For the last third of the movie the two groups meet for a dinner party and a few revelations.

The thing that strikes me with this movie is the gap between talk and reality. All their talk is of fantastic sex and adventurous escapades, yet when we see what actually happened it is usually less than fantastic and Remy, the usual male act, is rather pathetic and hardly a Don Juan. In fact, the sex and affairs seem more out of boredom than anything else.

Secondly, they all talk about sex and affairs as very liberated people. As if everything is fine. Yet, when the price comes, when the infidelity is revealed or in Claude’s case, a mysterious sickness, the pain and the regrets are the same as any other person. Pierre is happy screwing around left and right but he knows he will never get any children. The carelessness is not at all as careless as they want to make it seem.

Maybe the hypocrisy is what makes the movie funny or maybe it is that schadenfreude that these privileged people with their high ideals and liberated talk are as vain, stupid and conventional as the rest of us.

For me, that last part when they have to face up to reality was the bast part and it did make me laugh quite a bit. As comedies go, this is more high-brow than the common fare and requires more of the viewer. Especially, it is important to follow the dialogue. But it is a rewarding movie to watch, and I understand it spawned a few sequels, whom I only know by title, but will be inclined to watch.

I also was a bit envious of the meal they were having. That dish looked good.

She's Gotta Have It (1986)

 

She's Gotta Have It

Everybody starts somewhere and for Spike Lee, it was with “She’s Gotta Have It”. Or, at least this was his first feature length movie. As most such debuts, it is a low-cost affair, but one with a lot of qualities. It is also a sort of comedy, something I did not see coming.

The movie is aimed at explaining a woman called Nola Darling (Tracy Camilla Johns) and alternates between interviews with the characters and the actual story. In this manner it foretells the much later style of reality TV. The special thing about Nora Darling is her sex life. Rather than the usual serial monogamy, Nora practices parallel polygamy. At any time, Nora has several partners openly, mainly for the sex.

Suitor 1 is the gentle and polite Jamie (Tommy Redmond Hicks) who adores Nora and is ready to commit himself fully to her.

Suitor 2 is the street-smart but gangly Mars (Spike Lee himself), who is fun, or tries to be, but also rather needy.

Suitor 3 is the wealthy male model Greer (John Canada Terrell) who may have the looks and money, but is very much impressed with himself and rather intolerable.

Nora is enjoying being with all three of the men, but the men find it very hard to accept to share her with the others. Half their talk with Nora is trying to impress her, in their specific style, and the other half is complaining about her other men. From the general portrait of Nora, we learn that she has difficulty committing herself to anything but prefer to float around between things and just take what is coming. Pretty much like her relation to men.

Of course this must come to a head at some point, and the conclusion may be considered surprising except that it drives the point of the movie.

 It was a surprise to me that this was a comedy. The Spike Lee movies I know tend to lean on the heavy side, but this one is a lively affair with some pretty outré characters and situations. The narcissistic Greer is a hoot. Every time he opened his mouth I was giggling. Lee himself as Sam is also a comical character though on a slightly more subtle level and in both cases, it is amusing to see how Nora uses them. They appear super cool but are really dupes.

With Jamie it is different. His character does not play for comedy, but represents something else. He is the good guy, but understood in terms as the conventionally good guy. He is the person with the right opinions, saying and doing the right things, but those conventional values is everything Nola is not, and this is where the movie gets interesting. Who is it that says that Nola’s way of life is wrong? It is unconventional, but is conventional right? The normal story we get is that men are allowed to stray outside conventions, but here it is a woman and she is strong enough to stick to it. What we are challenged with is if conventions are really right. Should Nola conform or should the world accept Nola? And if something is okay for, why not for women?

The style of “She’s Gotta Have It” is gritty in its black and white cinematography and the documentary tone goes a long way to cover up and make believable the less than stellar acting performances. This feels like a movie made by friends on a shoestring budget, but in a wrapping that makes this acceptable, even preferable and supports the veracity. This looks like reality TV long before that was a thing.

Spike Lee has been called the Woody Allen of Afro-American cinema, and I can definitely see that. Everything from soundscape to cinematography and script screams New York, and this is a New York not that different from that of Woody Allen.

A very strong debut of Spike Lee. I look forward to watching his other movies on the List.

  

Short Circuit (1986)

 

Off-List: Short Circuit

The second off-List movie for 1986 is “Short Circuit”. I am of the general opinion that there are far too few comedies on the List, and I have a soft spot for these eighties comedies even if they do not necessarily qualify as great. “Short Circuit” was a big movie for me in my childhood, and I think it holds up better today than most comedies.

At the commercial research facility Nova five autonomous military drones are presented to the military. As this is the eighties, the drones are semi-humanoid with tracked drives and a face like a Mars rover. They are also mounted with a high-powered laser of Star Wars strength. The military is impressed with their capabilities but in the aftermath one of the drones are hit by lightning which resets its memory and does... something else. Like Frankenstein, the lightning seems to have imbued the drone with life. The drone, Number 5, goes AWOL and through accidents finds itself lost in a food truck.

The owner of the food truck, Stephanie (Ally Sheedy), first take the drone for being an extraterrestrial alien, but by the time she realizes it is a military robot, Number 5 has convinced her he is something more.

Meanwhile, the Nova facility is in an uproar. The top manager, Howard Marner (Austin Pendleton) is keen to get his expensive hardware back. His head of security, Captain Scroeder (G. W. Bailey), is eager to blow up the drone with excessive force if necessary. Engineers Newton Crosby (Steve Guttenberg) and Ben Jabituya (Fisher Stevens) want to secure the drone unharmed as their precious creation.

And so, the hunt begins. Who will get the drone or will Number 5’s newfound intelligence and newfound allies save it?

What makes “Short Circuit” such a charming movie is the character of Number 5. He is naive as a child, smart as a genius, but also lovable as a human being is supposed to be. This, being a “good person”, more than anything makes it the heart of the movie and then it does not hurt that it is funny to boot with a pile of great one-liners it clearly learnt from trashy TV shows and has very expressive “eyebrows”. Movies, especially Hollywood, has classified the “Alien” as either a scary and powerful danger (“The Terminator”) or the lovable creature teaching humans on what it means to be human (“E.T.”). Number 5 is clearly in the second category although it is created as belonging to the first. The transition is attributed to it “becoming alive”, but is really by equipping it with humanity.

From a comedy point of view, it was a scoop to make G. W. Bailey be Captain Scroeder. He is essentially the same character he played in “Police Academy” and that makes him a fantastic butt of the jokes and pranks pulled on him. It is tempting to see Steve Guttenberg in the same light, but rather than being a street-smart romantic, he is being the isolated, shy engineer. It is difficult for Guttenberg to be entirely convincing in this role, but he gives it a shot. His scenes are, however, usually stolen by Fisher Stevens who, in Indian brownface, mess up the English language every time he opens his mouth. I know it is hopelessly politically incorrect and I should be cringing badly, but it is hilariously funny.

“Short Circuit” is fantastic family entertainment. That category of films has since then suffered badly and the label today is more a warning to stay away than anything else, but forty years ago it was possible to make good family movies. As a thirteen-year-old boy I loved the movie and loved the charming robot and today, 39 years later, I still love this movie. I find different things fun and charming, but it is the same magic. In an age of drone warfare and AIs and autonomous driving this is a surprisingly relevant movie and it is great with a positive spin for a change on those topics.

Take your children to watch this movie. You will all get something out of it and likely have a good time.

 

Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)

 

Hannah og hendes søstre

Before this project, if asked what a Woody Allen movie is like, I would have described it as something akin to “Hannah and Her Sisters” despite never having watched it before. And precisely for this reason I would not voluntarily have sat down to watch one. Today, my opinion on his movies is more nuanced with some of them actually being among my favourites, but I am afraid “Hannah and Her Sisters” will not make it to that status.

The setup is a group of people in New York (of course) centred around three sisters, Hannah (Mia Farrow), Lee (Barbara Hershey) and Holly (Dianne Wiest). There are three main story arches and the movie switches between the three of them and let them meet at various points.

In one of these lines Elliot (Michael Caine), Hannah’s husbond, is trying and succeeding in having an affair with Lee. Elliot is basically a horny middle-aged man and when he realizes what he has done he is caught in a pickle of remorse and indecision but at least it made Lee leave the intolerable Frederick (Max von Sydow), a man incredibly impressed with himself.

Holly is a washed-up ex-drug addict. She is trying to become an actress (of course) and fails. Her attempt at catering goes south when her partner, April (Carrie Fisher) takes both her prospective boyfriend and acting assignment. Only when she turns to writing, it seems to work for her, except those around her clearly blame her for witing about them.

Finally, Hannah’s ex-husband, Mickey (Woody Allen) is going through a crisis when he thinks he has a brain tumour. Mickey is Allen classic so he is super neurotic, super self-centred and talking like a waterfall. When he learns there was no tumour, he quits his job at a television show and starts to look for the meaning of life.

The key word all round is that all these characters are insufferable. Everything is about themselves, their personal needs, their personal animosities and their need to be recognized. Some of them are weak, like Holly, some are strong like Frederick, and some are even somewhat amusing like Mickey, but they are all clowns, and their lives seem to balance on the edge of self-inflicted disaster.

For me, this makes it very difficult to relate and sympathize with any of them and I know it is me misunderstanding the purpose of the movie. This all plays out for comedy, and we are supposed to laugh at all these people making a mess of their (and each other’s) lives, but I usually have a problem with that sort of comedy and instead look at the characters with a mixture of dislike and pity. Underneath this attempt at comedy, I sense the tragedy of self indulgence.

What does work here is the scenery and the soundscape. Both are, again, Allen classic. This is more New York than “Sex and the City” and the soundtrack has that jazzy thirties vibe Allen is so well known for. We all know he is in love with the thirties, and this is just another proof.

It is also an impressive cast we get here, a cast that, except for Allen himself, is acting against type. Caine is literally pathetic, von Sydow is arrogant beyond belief and Maureen O'Sullivan, as the mother of the sisters, is a loud alcoholic. They do it all very well as do the girls. I just do not like their characters.

“Hannah and Her Sisters” went on to win three Academy Awards (Michael Caine and Dianne Wiest for supporting roles and Allen for Best Original Screenplay) and was nominated in another four categories including Best Picture, so clearly somebody liked it better than me.

To me, the highlight was Woody Allen trying to join the Hare Krishna. That is actually a funny thought.

 

Blue Velvet (1986)

 

Blue Velvet

It has been quiet here on my blog for the past few weeks. We have been moving into a new apartment, so movie watching has been taking backseat while we are getting ourselves installed. To top that off, we spent last week in Prague and visited, among many other things, a David Lynch exhibition. It is therefore very fitting that the next movie on the List is his “Blue Velvet”.

I like watching David Lynch’ movies. There is almost always an underlying mystery and while I know I will never fully understand it, this mystery provides a depth that goes far beyond the apparent story. In this respect “Blue Velvet” is middle of the range. It is more complex than “The Elephant man” and “Dune”, but not as obscure as “Eraserhead” and “Mulholland Drive”. It is sort of on par with “Twin Peaks” and that is not the only similarity with Lynch’ famous TV-series.

Young man Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) has returned to his hometown because his father had an accident. Left with little to do, he is sent off on an adventure when he finds an ear near his home. The police detective (George Dickerson) is a friend of his father, and this leads Jeffery to Detective Williams’ daughter, Sandy (Laura Dern). Jeffrey is fascinated with the mystery and when he learns that this may be related to nightclub singer Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini), he finds a way to enter her home.

Soon, Jeffrey is in way over his head. Dorothy is at the mercy of a brutal and rather unhinged man called Frank (Dennis Hopper) who seems to have kidnapped her son to keep her submissive. Jeffrey is getting close to Sandy, but also attracted to Dorothy whom he wants to help and in the middle of this is Frank. It is a rabbit hole, and the deeper Jeffrey gets into this hole the stranger and more disturbing it all get.

As a criminal mystery this is a slow burn with a plotline that appears fairly straight forward, but things are happening that are anything but straight forward. The world of Frank is a dark place, populated by strange and awkward types and feels almost unreal. Not everything that happens here makes sense and it seems to be spilling over into the outside world. Who is inside it and who is outside? It is quickly clear that something else is going on, something that may have little to do with the apparent story.

I make a point of not reading other viewer’s analysis of what is going on before writing these reviews and you may want to skip the next session if you want that mystery for yourself. On the other hand, my analysis is far from complete and I may be totally wrong, so what is the harm?

Sandy and Dorothy seem to represent two opposites. Sandy is virginial and pure, innocence personified while Dorothy represents the dark, fallen and spoiled. She is sin, blood and sex, but she is also a victim. Jeffrey is attracted to both as if they represent two opposing parts of him, the civilized and pure and the almost bestial lust and craving. Dealing with these two women is Jeffrey coming of age so to speak, finding himself. The Id and Super-ego in Freudian terms.

Frank is a demon, the devil maybe. His world is depravity and violence, breaking the rules and temptation. He has Dorothy in his power and he is threatening to swallow Jeffrey. The place Frank takes Jeffrey is a demonic parallel world disassociated from the surface world and the staircase to Dorothy’s apartment is the entrance to this hell, but also a portal for Jeffery to realize his subconscious desires.

With Sandy it is usually daytime and bright colours. There is an ease and happiness to those scenes, while all scenes with Dorothy, and particularly Frank, are  night scenes with a lot of red and heaviness. There is a lot of symbolism here that could be heaven and hell, but is more likely the civilized consciousness versus messy and dark subconscious. Where the two meet things get truly messy.

If this all sounds like Twins Peaks, I do not think that is a coincidence. A lot of the imagery and themes are the same, the soundscapes are similar and even the role of Kyle MacLachlan is almost the same. This is truly Lynch territory.

I think there is something about the ambience of Lynch’ movies that appeals to me. As a viewer, I am placed in that mysterious and ominous place that is scary but also strangely fascinating. I watched the first season of Twin Peaks back in the day in the middle of the night on a hospital and that totally works, for the record. “Blue Velvet” takes me to that place and therefor it ranks pretty high with me.

Definitely recommended.

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.