Rain Man (1988)

 

Rain Man

The one thing most people associate with the movie “Rain Man” is Dustin Hoffman’s portrayal of the autistic savant Raymond Babbitt. This to such an extent that many, if not most, who has no direct relations with autism, believe this is what it means to be autistic. I have a close relation on the spectrum and therefore have experienced first hand how unfair that assumption is. Raymond Babbitt is in my experience not a high functioning autistic but severely disabled by it. For most high functioning autists, they appear almost normal except their brains are wired differently and savant skills are quite rare, usually it is simply an ability to totally focus on an issue. Sorry, just needed to get that off my chest. What I actually meant to say here is that “Rain Man” has other qualities that makes it very much a worthwhile watch.

Tom Cruise is Charlie Babbitt, a smartass car dealer who may be a little too smart for his own good in his business dealings. In the opening we see him importing expensive cars and trying to strongarm both clients and creditors. When his father dies, he travels to the other end of the country with his girlfriend, Susanna (Valeria Golino), to the funeral and the reading of the will. Charlie was estranged from his father and is left with an old car and some rosebushes while the rest, 3 million dollars, goes to a trust fund for an undisclosed person. Charlie is furious and feels cheated out of his inheritance. He traces down the trustee and so meets his older brother Raymond, an autistic savant, who lives a protected life on a mental institution. Charlie had no idea he had a brother.

Charlie cooks up a scheme to kidnap his brother to be returned for half the inheritance and so leave the asylum with Raymond in the car. Raymond is extremely tied to his rituals and has only limited contact with the world around him. In some ways he is a child and Charlie who has no experience with autism and no care for anybody but himself is quickly going crazy over Raymond. Susanna is so disgusted with the way Charlie treats Raymond that she leaves him. This leaves Charlie alone with Raymond on the long drive back to Los Angeles.

This is where the core of the movie takes place. Somewhere between Susanna leaving him and their arrival in Los Angeles Charlie develops a relationship with his long-lost brother that changes him profoundly. This is the magic of the movie. If you only had the scenes in hotel where Susanna is leaving and those where Charlie is meeting Raymond’s doctor (Jerry Molen as Dr. Gerald Bruner) and the court appointed doctor (Barry Levinson, the director, as Dr. Marston) it would be entirely unbelievable to credit Chalie for becoming a caring guardian of his brother. You need to see everything that takes place in between. What starts as convenient acts to get thing going, like providing Raymond with a portable television, becomes acts of genuinely caring for his well being. Charlie gets to care for somebody else than himself.

Dustin Hoffman won Best Actor for his portrayal of the autistic brother and while that is a convincing feat, I do think Tom Cruise is the one who actually deserved the Oscar for making his transformation believable. It is nothing short of stunning, maybe his best performance ever. The moment where Charlie learns that the Rain Man he vaguely recalls from his childhood is actually Raymond and that Raymond was sent away when he accidentally scalded his younger brother is a gem, but really, it is a process they go through and that is so much harder to describe than a single, magically transformative moment. When we see them together at the casino in Las Vegas the bonding is almost complete and it is beautiful to watch.

“Rain Man” was the big winner in a very strong year. It was nominated in eight categories and won four of them. Beside Best Actor it won Best Picture, Best Director (Barry Levinson) and Best original screenplay. With very strong competition, this was only possible because we got to believe in the bromance and the character development. The movie hinges on that.

I like “Rain Man” despite stigmatizing autism, but then again, Raymond is a hero and how many autistic heroes are there in the movies?

Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988)

 

Hvem snørrede Roger Rabbit

There is a small subgenre of movies that mix animation and live action. In an era where CGI makes up a significant portion of almost any movie, you could argue that this is not really a genre anymore, except where the animated part is supposed to look animated. Essentially cartoon characters mixed in with live action. The most famous among these and in my opinion the best (I have not yet watched “Coyote vs. Acme”) is “Who framed Roger Rabbit. I was in ninth grade when it came out and it was all the rage among us youngsters who wanted to be seen as adults, but still at heart were children.

In a version of 1947 Los Angeles where cartoon characters are not just something you watch on the screen, but actual actors that live and breathe in their own territory, Toontown, private detective Eddie Valiant (Bob Hoskins) got a job to dig up some dirt on Jessica Rabbit (voice acted by Kathleen Turner. Studio owner R.K. Maroon (Alan Tilvern) is convinced that Jessica’s husband Roger Rabbit (voice acted by Charles Fleischer) is performing poorly because of her extra-marital activities. Eddie is reluctant as he does not want to work with ‘Toons, his brother was killed by one (got a piano on his head), but he needs the money. This sounds like a classic opening for a Phillp Marlowe story and that is exactly what it is supposed to be, except Raymond Chandler never wrote in cartoon characters.

True to form, there is a deeper plot that is only gradually revealed, and nothing is what it looks like. Marvin Acme (yes, that Acme) (Stubby Kaye) is a stiff showing up. Jessica Rabbit is that Dame that may or may not be a lot more than she looks like. Except being “more” than she is, is not physically possible. Behind everything is a villain as sinister as any Chandler could have dreamed up. Dr. Doom is exactly that, a representative of doom, and Christopher Lloyd gives him exactly that sort of madness we recognize so well from “Back to the Future”.

There is no way this would not end up being silly, but it is a silliness the movie embraces. The Toons are wacky, exactly the way we know them from the classic shorts, but they are also integrated into this world and fleshed out to be a little more than their silly selves. Daffy and Donald Duck work in a club where their show always involves them fighting a war on each other. Roger Rabbit and Baby Herman film a classic short, but offscreen Baby Herman is a cigar smoking adult in a baby’s body who hit on the girls. Of course, a lot of this makes absolutely no sense. The movie does not even begin to explain why there are these cartoon characters walking around. It simply accepts that this is the way it is and asks us to do they same. The raison d’etre of the Toons is to make us laugh, both in the world of the movie and for us, the audience.

It is funny, once you accept the world. Maybe not as funny as I thought back in the day, but judging from my son’s reaction, who is of the same age I was back then, this is actually holding up quite well. Anybody who loves the classic shorts will find their favourite characters here. Knowing this is a Disney production, this could have stuck with the various Disney casts, but it includes a lot from many of the other productions, especially those of Looney Tunes. Cameos mostly, but so many of them that they are more than just flavour.

Maybe the most impressive element of “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” is how the live action cast manages to keep a straight face to all the silliness that surrounds them. This could so easily have washed out in an “everybody are crazy” scenario, but with very few exceptions the cast takes this serious enough for it to work. Silly characters desperately need a non-silly world to be silly in, otherwise they are not funny. Today it is standard that actors need to imagine the world they are in or the characters they are playing against when they are filming on greenscreen where computer generated opponents will only be added later, but in 1988 this was a weird situation for the actors and seeing how well they cope with that is impressive. Bob Hoskins especially manages this very well.

“Who Framed Roger Rabbit” was nominated for seven technical Academy Awards and won four of them. While it missed the big ones, I still think this is pretty good, it is an impressive movie. What really matters, though, is that it still works for its target group. That is not a given thing.

A Tale of the Wind (Une Historie de Vent) (1988)

 

Une Histoire de vent

Joris Ivens was a very influential filmmaker, especially of documentaries, from the late twenties to his death in 1989. His work was in long periods very political with frequent visits to the Soviet Union, China and North Vietnam and he was based in Eastern Europe for an extended period. While his socialist position is well known, he was also something of a rebel, even to the socialist regimes, and in his later years his projects became more personal. His final movie “Une Histoire de vent” (“A Tale of the Wind”) falls very much into that category and it is likely selected as representative of Joris Ivens’ work.

The mission of Ivens with this movie is to film something as illusive as the wind. It features himself as an old man (he was 90 years old at the time) searching for the wind and a way to film it. This search is as much a metaphysical journey as a technical project and it takes some surrealist turns as he explores wind.

There is the wind we breathe. A martial arts master controls his breathing as opposed to the asthmatic Ivens who needs an inhalator. In the desert, the locals are hunkering down in expectation of a storm and Ivens sits on a chair on top of a dune waiting for it to come. In a dream sequence, Ivens travel in Méliès rocket to the moon and meets Chang’e, the moon goddess, but on the moon, there is no wind. There is a strange setup with a stylized village in a studio with political speeches and various activities and in a cave, Ivens is presented with a mask of a wind god. Throughout, a man dressed as the Chinese Monkey King is playing havoc with the going-ons.

I cannot claim I understand everything going on here. The only part that feels real is Ivens failed attempt at getting to film the terracotta army in Xian and his (strange) alternative recreation of the army that turns into a musical act. There is that common theme of the wind and Ivens at the centre of it. In some sequences I understand how this is a way to describe wind, in others I strain to understand it and it becomes very much a personal thing for Ivens. To call it accessible has mostly do to with it not being political but “merely” poetic.

There is something exciting for me in watching a movie about wind. Wind is very much a part of my professional life. In my story there would be big wind turbines calmly rotating, powering our lives. There would be sand blowing by (check, it is in the movie) and weather forecasts. There would all the pioneers who developed an industry and hippies who dreamt of a better future. That is altogether a far more prosaic story than Ivens’ and probably less interesting for most people, yet I cannot help feeling that I would have loved this movie to be a little more tangible and less poetic. I get the overall point, but I feel there is so much more to say about the subject.

However, this is Joris Iven’s story and not mine. Ivens is looking for something illusive he has been trying to catch throughout his professional career, and this is his slightly self-ironic comment on that chase. It may not actually be the wind as such but something that wind represents.

As a movie it is easy enough to watch, especially if you do not expect to understand it. It feels cozy and comforting and so I am okay with it.

    

Die Hard (1988)

 

Die Hard

You can normally tell how important a movie is by the size of its Wikipedia entry. We are not talking “Sight and Sound” importance, but pop-culture significance. The entry for “Die Hard” is enormous. The only entries I recall being longer were for “Star Wars”, Indiana Jones, the franchise and “Back to the Future”. It is actually crazy because “Die Hard” is just another action movie with a single good guy up against a lot of bad guys. Or is it a lot more? Why is it that I never get tired of watching this movie?

It is Christmas Eve’s day and John McClane (Bruce Willis) is travelling from New York where he is a policeman to Los Angeles to spend Christmas with his children and separated wife Holly McClane nee Gennaro (Bonnie Bedelia). She works for the Nakatomi Corporation, and her boss, in appreciation, has sent a limousine to take John to the Nakatomi tower where the staff is celebrating Christmas. John has hardly arrived before the building is attacked by a very professional group led by Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman), who look like terrorists but are there to steal over 600-million-dollar worth of untraceable bearer bonds.

With the exception of those outright killed, the Nakatomi staff are all herded together and kept as hostages. The only one to escape this is, correctly guessed, John McClane. Here starts a cat against mouse game where John is continuously chased through the building while trying to alarm the outside world to what is happening. This is noisy, full of last-minute saves and brutal deaths as the terrorists are decimated and John is worn down.

Gruber’s gang is incredibly well prepared and seems to have anticipated everything. When John finally gets through to the outside world, they act exactly as Gruber has predicted and appear not only stupid and useless but actually helpful to Gruber’s scheme. Only Al Powell (Reginald VelJohnson), the police Sergeant John first get through to, seems to understand what is actually going on here. Everybody else are so confident in their own brilliance that they fail to question the situation. In a side story, the media, both in the bits we see on screen and in the form of a TV journalist, Thornberg (William Atherton) with incredibly low integrity, is both cheap and dumb.

The major part of the movie is this duel between McClane and Gruber. It fascinating and exciting simply for its inventiveness and adrenalin inducing action and while I read several assessments on the success of “Die Hard that pin it on themes like a fallible hero or the single man against the system, I am convinced that it is largely due to the chemistry of these two characters and by extension, Willis and Rickman. They play up against each other incredibly well and this is not only through their immortal one-liners but just about everything about them. In retrospect, Willis’ character is a little too obvious, maybe even cliché and his dialogue, especially with himself, in the beginning may be stating the obvious, but as things heat up, this is entirely forgotten and his talking to himself simply means we get access to his thoughts. Rickman in a similar way is opening his character to us with his arrogant, snarling dialogue, again often with himself, that is simply brilliantly evil. These two characters could be doing dishes together and it would be great to look at and especially listen to. Instead, they happen to totally destroy a 40-stories office building.

I have watched “Die Hard” more times than I care to think of. This is a staple during Christmas, together with “Christmas Vacation”, and I never get tired of watching it. Taking it apart, this should be a standard action movie, but Willis and Rickman make it so much more than that. It spawned a franchise that has only stopped with Wills poor health, but none of the sequels, despite the intense action elements, come close to “Die Hard” itself. The obvious reason is they are lacking half of the equation: Rickman. There is no making up for that.

Yippie-kai-yeah!

Landscapes in the Mist (Topio Stin Omichli) (1988)

 

Landscape in the Mist

With “Landscape in the Mist” (“Topío stín omíchli”) we are in the territory of symbolism movies. This means that what we see have only limited apparent meaning, but is loaded with symbols that tell a much deeper story. This is the type of movie that critiques tend to love and the general audience ignores. If I can work out that real story, this can be interesting. If I cannot, it is often an ordeal. I think this one falls in the second category.

We follow two children, Voula (Tania Palaiologou) a girl of 10-12 years and her little brother, Alexandros (Michalis Zeke), who is around 5 years old. They are embarking on a voyage to Germany from Greece to find a father they have never met. The movie is a sort of a road movie from Greece to Germany. It makes little sense to describe this journey in a linear sense. Instead, it is episodic where each sequence is only tenuously connected to the previous and the next. The children are very quiet, especially to other people and when they speak, it is in monologues as if speaking their innermost feelings or dreams or maybe poetry. Scripted, is not a bad label. There are things happening in each scene that often has nothing to do with the children and even though they are there, they may not even be witness to what is happening.

They meet an uncle that wants nothing to do with them. They experience snow and a bride fleeing in the snow. A chicken is loose in a bar and a violinist plays in a restaurant. They get picked up by a truck drive who rapes Voula (Ick!!!) and they meet Orestes (Stratos Tzortzoglou) who works for a theatre troupe. Orestes tries (maybe) to help them, but he comes and goes throughout the movie. The theatre troupe is the same as in Theo Angelopoulos’s earlier movie, “The Travelling Players”. Exactly what their function is here I do not know. Orestes is a Greek mythological character that killed his father. Maybe that is a hint.

The scenery is both real and unreal. It is a winter landscape very far from the summer vacation Greece we are familiar with. Almost all the scenes are dreary places. Dirty industry, lonely roads, construction sites, poor housing areas. Even the train looks battered. It all looks like places you do not want to be as if they symbolize a half-hellish place. Germany, the coveted land where their maybe-father resides is, it seems, at the border of Greece and you get there by crossing a fence and a river and as Germany is decidedly NOT at the border of Greece, this means it symbolizes something else and I get to think of the river Styx that parts our world from Hades. If that is the case, maybe the girls are stuck in hell and a looking for a way out to the real world. Maybe.

There are so many things I do not understand here, such as the giant hand being fished out of the water or the presence of the theatre group from the earlier movie and those are just highlights. So much is strange and stylized that your experience totally depends on getting that deeper story and I simply have no clue what is going on here.

It is impossible not to talk about the rape of Voula. The fact that we do not actually see the act, does not make it easier to deal with. Rape is terrible and rape on a child is simple one of the worst things. Seeing it here was shocking. I know that since everything in this movie should be seen for its symbolic value, this is not a “real” rape of a child, but a stand-in for something like violation of innocence, but I do not really care. What I saw was a rape on a child and that is a no go zone no matter what the intention is.

As mentioned in the header, this is a movie for movie critiques. It has won a number of prices and with the right amount of attention and a sufficiently intellectual approach, this is possibly great. My problem with this movie is that I did not get there and so instead “Landscape in the Mist” is an incoherent mess. My guess is that this was not a great success at the box office.  

Grave of the Fireflies (Hotaru no Haka) (1988)

 

Grave of the Fireflies

This is just about the saddest movie ever made. “Grave of the Fireflies” (“Hotaru no Haka”) is a Studio Ghibli movie drawn and told for children, and I can only imagine the mayhem this have caused when shown to a bunch of six-year-olds. They will have been traumatized for life.

The movie opens with a scene from what looks like a train station. A young man/boy in rags die and the janitors throw his only possession, an old candy box, out into the fields. Where it lands, two ghosts appear, a boy and a little girl, and they drive away on a ghost train.

That sort of sets the stage.

In the final year of the second world war, Seita’s and Setsuko’s home is firebombed by American planes, and their mother dies from her gruesome injuries. Their father being away in the navy, means the two children are alone. Seita, a boy of presumably fourteen years, takes charge of his little sister, a girl of, again presumably, four years of age. An aunt takes them into her home, but before long she grows resentful of having two extra mouths to feed. She makes Seita sell all their mother’s stuff and take out her savings, but even with that she pesters the children so much they eventually leave.

Seita finds a disused bomb shelter that he turns into their new home. He scavenges for food and utensils and turns to stealing, but it is not enough. Eventually Setsuko gets ill from malnutrition and dies of starvation. Seita cremates her in a little coffin and quickly wastes away himself. This is not really a spoiler; we learn this in the first two minutes of the movie.

“Grave of the Fireflies” is drawn in that classic Ghibli style. It is not Miyazaki but Takahata who is behind this one, but it still very much looks like a Ghibli movie. The two main characters are very sympathetically drawn, and especially Setsuko is a very loveable little energy bomb. Classic animé style. This is a style very appealing to children and therefore “Grave of the Fireflies” looks like a children’s movie. This makes it so much harder to watch. The fate of these two children is likely not so unusual during the war, but we feel it with extra poignancy. Seita is way too young to have to take care of himself, much less have responsibility for his sister. He must grow up very fast, but even though he makes a heroic effort, it is not enough and that is so bitter an experience. In this type of movies, the good guys wins, effort pays off and through hardship people grow, but the world in “Grave of the Fireflies” is brutal and has no mercy for our protagonists. No matter how much Seita fights, he is doomed to a short life of suffering and death.

Setsuko is innocence personified. No matter how much Seita tries to shield her, she is also doomed. Letting such a child suffer seems like a horrible crime, yet this is the world they are facing. Everybody is busy taking care of themselves and their own and even an little girl like Setsuko finds no one but Seita to care for her. It is a scathing attack, until you understand that everybody was suffering. At the time the story takes place, Japan had been bombed to pieces, including by two nukes. Setsuko and Seita are simply the faces of all these unknown fates.

There is no doubt this is a beautiful movie, and it also feels like an important movie. I have seen it ranking very high on a number of lists and I cannot say this is not deserved. What I am struggling with is seeing this as a children’s movie. I found it very hard to watch and needed some breaks along the way. Try take your young child to the cinema to watch this, believing this is a cozy movie like “My Neighbour Totoro”? I wonder how many children sat through the entire movie.

I do like Ghibli movies and quality-wise this is among the best. My son, though, is the real expert. Still, he managed just about twenty minutes then he gave up. I would love to recommend it, but you need to be in a very special mood.

     

Dangerous Liaisons (1988)

 

Dangerous Liaisons

A few years ago, I reviewed the book “Dangerous Liaisons” on my book blog. Now, five years later, it is time to do the same for the 1988 movie based on that book. I went back to my old review and found that it could be used 1:1 as a review of the movie. Normally, that would be a recommendation since a faithful adaption is the exception rather than the rule, but this was a story I did have some trouble to digest and so I find the same problems apply to the movie.

It is the era of the Ancien Régime in France, the period of idle rich nobility in wigs and powder and silly outfits before they got a close shave in the French revolution. Marquise de Merteuil (Glenn Close) and Vicomte de Valmont (John Malkovich) are two such unprincipled libertines who entertain themselves with manipulation of other people. Both consider themselves absolute master of the art of seduction and manipulation and have sort of a game going on, which is not entirely transparent.

Merteuil requires Valmont to seduce and ruin the young Cecile de Volanges (Uma Thurman) as revenge on her future husband, an absent and much older man who has a history with Merteuil. Valmont has another task in mind, to seduce and corrupt the religious and married Madame de Tourvel (Michelle Pfeiffer), a much harder challenge than the inexperienced Cecile. He does get a chance at both at his aunt’s chateau which involves a lot of deceit, blackmail and spycraft. A very young Keenu Reeves as Chevalier Danceny is thrown in as a tool of Merteuil for the corruption of Cecile.

As in the book, the plot is rather confusing. Partly because of the several, often contradicting, agendas, but also because it is hard to understand the motivation behind these shenanigans. At times this looks like a simple scoring points game. Sort of a game to prove how awesomely powerful Valmont and Merteuil are. At other times it looks like they are trying to impress each other so that, if they are awesome enough, the other will love him or her back. This may be particularly the case for Valmont, whereas Merteuil simply define herself by this craft. Still, these seem very unsatisfying motivations, to do these things simply because they are good at it, and as I wrote in my review of the book, they are both more like caricatures, the boogeymen libertines used to scare people away from an immoral life, than supposed to be actual living people. While this would work well for a novel in the eighteenth century, it is hardly an argument for a movie in 1988. Rather than being scary characters, they came across as pathetic and sorry creatures who are entirely delusional both of their own prowess and the meaning of their lives. The ending seems to confirm this impression.

John Malkovich’ Valmont is a strange creature. At least in his own eyes he is dashing and irresistibly charming and, yes, I know I am of the wrong gender, but I totally fail to see how Valmont is so fantastic. To me he is incredibly creepy and not subtle at all in the way he comes on to women. Except when he resorts to blackmail, I do not understand why it should be so hard to say no to this creep. I know this is a different era with women in a much less favourable position, but should they be this weak? I find that hard to accept.

“Dangerous Liaisons” has two things going for it big time though. The cinematography is amazing. Everything is all eighteenth century. Costumes, sets, music, tone. I can live with the American accent as I doubt this cast would do well in French and I got used to it super fast (with the possible exception of Keenu Reeves). The second thing is that very cast. This is almost a who-is-who in acting, 1988. Especially on the women’s side, this is a supremely strong cast. I can sense the glee in the dressing-up and they are all a lot more than just pretty princesses. If only they could have been allowed to be stronger, but that I suppose is very much a product of the time.

Ultimately, it is a story about vastly delusional characters who are allowed to get away with their abuse, but ultimately implode when reality burst their bubble. Is that great to watch? Probably for a lot of people, but I get very little out of this. I therefore find it hard to recommend it.