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.