The Untouchables (1987)

 

De uovervindelige

It may just be me who is not that much into gangster movies and that I am deeply unfair, but “The Untouchables” feels to me a bit flat. A beautifully wrapped package, but the thing inside is the same gift I got last year and the year before. Can you be disappointed with something that looks so great?

It is 1930 and Al Capone (Robert De Niro) is the de facto king of Chicago, largely fuelled by the illegal import and sale of liquor during the prohibition. Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner) of the Treasury department is tasked with doing something about this problem. This is not easy, because Capone and his money are everywhere, even within the police department, so Ness learns the hard way that he must work outside the normal law enforcement system. Ness forms a small group around him consisting of veteran policeman and mentor Jimmy Malone (Sean Connery), young sharpshooter George Stone (Andy Garcia), whose real name is Guiseppe and thus closer to the Italian community in Chicago than the others, and accountant Oscar Wallace (Charles Martin Smith).

Wallace, who is intended as the somewhat comical character, early on mumbles a lot about Capone’s tax irregularities, but Ness is far more focussed on Capone’s crimes of violence. The team, soon called The Untouchables because they refuse bribe, focuses on busting Capones operations which certainly catches Capone’s attention and a war between the two starts. Capone is not shy of any sort of imitation. It is only when a raid yields a book with the accounting of Capone’s business transactions that Ness realizes Capone can be nailed for this. At that point however, Capone means serious business, the sort that comes out of the end of a gun.

There is no discussing the quality of the execution of this movie. Everything has been very carefully done in the best way possible. The recreation of 1930 Chicago is flawless, down to minute details. The filming is done in a brownish colour tone that emulates the black and white image we have of the era while remaining in colour. The tracking shots and steady-cam shots are flawlessly executed, giving a presence and first-person impression that is very convincing. The soundtrack by Ennio Morricone is as usual excellent, with bits of contemporary music by Duke Ellington thrown in. Most importantly, the casting is genius. Robert De Niro as Capone is exactly spot on. He has for a generation been the incarnation of a mafia boss. Costner as Ness works very well and Connery as Malone is another match in heaven. Yet it is Garcia and Smith that I particularly noticed. Their roles may be smaller, but they were exactly right for those parts.

SPOILER ALERT!

When I am still grumping about “The Untouchables” it is because of the structure of the movie, the plot if you will. This is a plot that very much tries to play it safe. We can pretty much predict every step of the way and any attempt at a plot twist is either something we have seen before or something that is not taken far enough. We get a hint of uncomfortability when Capone through his henchmen start threatening Ness family, but the story never follows up on that. Wallace and Malone die, but they are sacrificable and the conclusion in the courtroom almost feel anticlimactic.

When reading up on the movie I learned that practically everything in the movie except the characters were invented and even some of those were not real. This is obviously one of the more dramatic events in American history, yet the scriptwriters found it necessary to completely rewrite event to conform with Hollywood templates. I am not so naive that I do not know there always is a level of adaption, but it seems to me that in this case a potentially very interesting and exciting story is reduced to a cliché in anticipation of what the audience wants to see. The point is not that Ness never killed Nitti (Billy Drago). The point is that he does it in the movie to conform to the predictable plot.

Again, I have to mention that I am not big on gangster movies in the first place. I find it very hard to get into them. At least in this case we are not supposed to sympathize with the gangsters, but the flatness of the “good” side makes it equally difficult to get close to them. A fan of the genre may see it differently. Still, and no denying, this is a very pretty movie.  

A Chinese Ghost Story (Sien Nui Yau Wan) (1987)

 

A Chinese Ghost Story

As usual, when watching movies from far away places, I feel a bit on shaky ground as I do not always understand the background or context of what I am watching. “A Chinese Ghost Story” or “Sien Nui Yau Wan” strikes me as the Hong Kong version of “Evil Dead”. Sort of a horror comedy with over-the-top monsters, gross-out visuals and silly dialogue. I could be entirely wrong, and this is actually an established Hong Kong tradition, which it certainly is in terms martial arts by wire, in which case I have just demonstrated by complete ignorance.

Ning Caichen (Leslie Cheung) works as a debt collector, but it is not really going well for him. The ink in his book of debts has washed out so when he arrives in the town he is supposed to collect from, he is out of money and must stay in the only free place in town, a deserted temple. There is good reason the temple is deserted as it is haunted by ghosts with an appetite for humans. Nin Caichen knows nothing of this and the only reason he survives his first night is his fumbling luck and complete ignorance. He meets a pretty girl, Nie Xiaoqian (Joey Wong), and is infatuated by her. He also meets a Daoist priest, Yan Chixia (Wu Ma), who lives as a hermit at the temple, keeping the ghosts at bay.

Until Ning Caichen learns the girl is a ghost, he thinks he is protecting her from a madman, especially after seeing him decapitate one of Nie Xiaoqian’s sisters. When the priest finally convinces him they are indeed dangerous ghosts, he is terrified but agrees on a scheme to lure them out. Ning Caichen also learns that Nie Xiaoqian is a prisoner of “The Big Lady” (Lau Siu-ming), who is actually a terrible tree demon. To help Nie Xiaoqian, Yan Chixia and Ning Caichen enter a dramatic battle against the tree demon using all sorts of magic weapons to fight a ginormous demonic tongue. The battle eventually takes them to the underworld to fight even worse monsters.

I recognize three levels to this movie. At the first and most immediate level, this is a combined love and ghost story (Ning Caichen is after all in love with a ghost). It is not too hard to follow that story. Love is sweet and the ghosts are dangerous. The priest is a ghost hunter, and Ning Caichen is anything but a warrior. At the second level this is a comedy, which is much harder to translate. Practically all the dialogue comedy is lost on me. When the characters are supposed to be funny, they just look stupid or strange and only when the action turns comedic does the comedy start to work for me. This is not strange at all and very common. Comedy is extremely difficult to translate and for the Chinese the same is probably true the other way round. At the third level, this is a martial arts movie in the wuxia tradition with fancy swordplay and lots of wirework. It is over-the-top, but that is almost always the case and whether they are throwing magic spells or deadly thrusts at each other, it is dramatic to look at and not so difficult to follow. Martial arts translate fairly well. Luckily, as I mentioned, some of the comedy extends to these fighting scenes and we enter the same realm of horror comedy as that of “Evil Dead”.

The further we get into the movie, the more we enter this familiar territory and for me as a westerner the better “A Chinese Ghost Story” gets. All those battle scenes are impressive and the love story between the ghost and the mortal is sweet. Anything that happens in the town, though, feels awkward and amateurish, basically because it plays on a comedy I do not get.

This is very much an eighties movie where most of the budget was spent on the special effects. The soundtrack is... Chinese electronica and the acting is... well, Chinese. I am not the right judge of that. Apparently, “A Chinese Ghost Story” hit it big time in Hong Kong and became an underground cult phenomenon in mainland China, creating all sorts of spin-offs and what-not, so obviously it got a lot of things right.

I did enjoy it more than I expected. Certainly more than I expected ten minutes into the movie. Once it really gets rolling, we just need Ash showing up with his chainsaw to save the day.

   

The Princess Bride (1987)

 

The Princess Bride

For some strange reason, “The Princess Bride” was not a big thing in Denmark. I had never even heard of the movie until I was introduced to it by my astonished wife. Although I have watched it multiple times since, this is an excellent movie, it is not one of those eighties’ movie with a patina of sweet childhood memories. To me, it does not feel that old.

The story of “The Princess Bride” is a bedside story told by a grandfather (Peter Falk) to his grandchild (Fred Savage), a bedridden child of around 10. This is a fairytale, so it takes place in a fairytale world. In this world a girl, Buttercup (Robin Wright) is in love with a farmhand, Westley (Cary Elwes). Westley leaves to seek his fortune, but is captured by the Dread Pirate Roberts and rumoured dead. Buttercup is devastated and five years later betrothed to the arrogant prince Humperdinck (Chris Sarandon), a man she does not love.

Shortly before the wedding, Buttercup is kidnapped by an unlikely trio led by the dwarf Vizzini (Wallace Shawn). He is accompanied by a giant, Fezzik (André the Giant) and a Spanish swordsman, Inigo Montoya (Mandy Patinkin). They are chased by a mysterious stranger which they first take for the Dread Pirate Roberts, but eventually turns out to be Westley. What ensues is too good to reveal in a synopsis. Suffice to say that Prince Humperdinck and his evil advisor, Count Tyrone Rugen (Christopher Guest) are the true bad guys here and both Buttercup and Westley must pass a lot of trials on their way.

The plot of “The Princess Bride” is nothing special. It is the characters and the dialogue that wins the price here. Both are magnificent. Vizzini as the Sicilian smartass has some fantastic lines including his ubiquitous “Inconceivable” and “Never enter a land war in Asia”. Inigo Montoya is hunting for the six-fingered man who killed his father and dream of telling him “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die”. This is his life mission and for this he has become a master swordsman. Both Humperdinck and Rugen are absolutely awesomely evil and ridiculous. Exactly the over-the-to villains that makes a good movie great. Guest is particularly awesome and such a departure from his role in “This is Spinal Tap”. We even get Mel Smith and Billy Crystal in small but vital roles.

Because of these fantastic characters, “The Princess Bride” is amazingly rewatchable. It is one of those movies you enjoy quoting the lines from so that if you hear someone screaming “The cliffs of insanity!”, you know what they have be watching. This is the kind of comedy that may not have you rolling on the ground on first view, but one that drops so many pearls that, I at least, cannot help loving it more every time I watch it.

This also happens to be one of my wife’s favourite movies.

Not long ago Rob Reiner got murdered, apparently by his own son. It was such a crazy story and it made me think of all those great movies Reiner made, especially back in the eighties, and not least “The Princess Bride”. He had a very good streak and even though his late movies may not have reached the same level, he was one of Hollywood’s great directors (and producer).

“The Princess Bride” is a fun watch and an essential comedy of the eighties. If it had not been on the list, I would have added it in a heartbeat.

 

Pelle the Conqueror (1987)

 

Pelle Erobreren

“Pelle Erobreren” (“Pelle the Conqueror”) is an entry on the Danish version of the List (replaces “Princess Bride”). It is based on a book that is very famous in Denmark by author Martin Andersen Nexø, a fellow we were always tormented by in literature classes in my youth, and catapulted director Bille August into international stardom. Though I have known about the movie since it came out, I never had the courage to sit through its reputed 2 hours and 40 minutes of misery.

Lasse Karlsson (Max von Sydow) is a poor Swedish farmworker who, upon being a widower, emigrates to the Danish island of Bornholm with his young son, Pelle (Pelle Hvenegaard). It is the middle of the nineteenth century and at this time farmwork was all manual labour, which required many hands, which in turn was available at low cost. Lasse and Pelle get hired on Stengården, owned by Kongstrup (Axel Strøbye) with the day-to-day operation in the hands of the brutal steward (Erik Påske).

Life as farmhands on Stengården is hard work, full of humiliations, random punishments and unfair treatment. Being the lowest of the lowest, Swedish farmhands get no protection anywhere. Lasse knows this, lowers his shoulders and accepts, but it is harder for Pelle to accept this, and he keeps ending up in situations where his position makes him lose.

The movie is episodical and takes us through a string of events in Pelle’s years on Stengården. There is his interaction with Rud (Troels Asmussen), a boy in, if possible, worse conditions than Pelle, with Erik (Björn Granath), a fellow Swede who dreams of going to Sweden and rebels against the treatment he gets, but ends up brain damaged in an accident, and the other children in school, who torments Pelle in ways that may threaten his life.

While we learn early on that Kongstrup has fathered several bastard children (including Rud), it gets really disgusting when he impregnates his own niece, Jomfru Sine (Sofie Gråbøl in a very early role), who is suddenly not so much jomfru (virgin) anymore. It is not that Kongstrup is evil, he just does not care about others, and nobody is to stop him from doing what he feels like.

This is of course a political story, telling of the appalling conditions the working people on the countryside lived under in those days. Sort of “Novocento” without the screaming. Martin Andersen Nexø was exactly that, so it comes as no surprise. What may be surprising though is the tone of the movie. Rather than going for the dramatic, it is almost resigned and apathetic in the apparent acceptance of the gross injustices being thrown at us. It is melancholia rather than anger that we feel as Lasse and Pelle are powerless against a cruel fate. The message is of course that it should not be like that, but in the headspace of Lasse, there is no real alternative. The world is stuck and any attempt at improvement is doomed and will send you right back to where you came from.

Pacing may be a problem with this movie. Its long run time and the time it allows itself to tell the story is straining, but there are also many episodes to cover and what the movie lacks in pacing, it serves in intensity. Especially Max von Sydow is incredibly convincing as Lassefar. He is a simple character, but Sydow becomes this character in a way that is almost scary. He was indeed nominated as Best Actor at the Academy Awards for this performance and that was well deserved. This great actor only received two nominations in his glorious career.

There are a few technical mysteries like Pelle’s amazing feat in learning Danish with a native accent in a matter a few months or how the good people of Bornholm, known for their very special and strong accent, in this movie uses a variety of accents covering most of the country, but, one the other hand, the visuals are flawless. This looks authentic through and through, the harbour, the boats, the farm, the cloth, even the food they eat. Very impressive.

“Pelle Erobreren” is a big movie, a movie that covers a lot of ground and which requires something of the viewer, but it is also a rewarding movie, if you can live with the pacing. It went on to win the Palme D’Or in Cannes and Best Foreign Language movie at the Academy Awards, but for some reason, it did not qualify for the international version of the List. I can think of a few movies I would have sacrificed to make room for this one.

Highly recommended, especially if you are interested in conditions on the Danish countryside in the mid-nineteenth century or want to watch Max von Sydow at his best.

Housekeeping (1987)

 

Housekeeping

After Bill Forsyth made “Local Hero”, he went on to make “Housekeeping”, a movie I never heard of before it came up on the List. I am apparently not alone. Turned out that the producer got fired from Columbia and the studio, as a result, gave the movie minimal attention. It has therefore flown under the radar of literally everybody and that is truly a shame. This is a little gem.

Somewhere in the Northwest (Seattle?) in, presumably, the 1940’ies, a young mother, Helen (Margot Pinvidic), set off to Fingerbone, Idaho, to put off her two daughters, Ruth and Lucille, at her mother’s house before she drives off a cliff and into the lake.

Years later, sometime in the fifties, the grandmother dies and the two girls, being teenagers, are without a guardian. Two aunts come by temporarily, but flee back to where they came from when Helen’s sister, Sylvie (Christine Lahti) arrive. Sylvie is... eccentric. She is a drifter, who never stays long in any one place. She is married but seem to hardly remember her husband. She does all these odd things that are more whims than anything. To the girls she acts more like a friend than a parent and it is often them who must keep track of her than the other way round.

To begin with Lucille (Andrea Burchill) and Ruth (Sara Walker) are so alike they appear to be twins and they seem to speak with one voice. The presence of Sylvie, though, creates a rift between them. Lucille sees Sylvie as a problem. Lucille wants to fit in with all the other townsfolk and wants to break out of the bubble of weirdness she thinks Sylvie is creating. Eventually she moves out of the house, to stay with one of her teachers. Ruth on the other hand feels like an outcast herself with more of a kinship to Sylvie. She likes the isolation and fears other people. To her, being totally accepted by Sylvie is a door opening to a world where she does not have to fit in in a normal sense. The rift escalates to the point where Lucille is setting the town authorities on Sylvie to “save” Ruth.

This is an innocent looking movie with a surprisingly lot going on, most of which in subtle ways that are unobtrusive until you notice them. One of the curious details is the almost complete lack of men in the movie. They are simply... absent. This forces the women to make their own decisions and in a patriarchal society such as rural villages in the fifties, this tastes like freedom. What then do you do with that freedom? Helen used it to kill herself. Sylvie uses it to do whatever comes to her mind, but generally avoid responsibility. Their mother ran her home as if her husband was there. He just wasn’t. Lucille and Ruth are coming of age, and they are in a position, perhaps more than their contemporaries, where they must decide what they want to do. Lucille’s choice is to join the conventional world with all the comforts of fitting in, while Ruth’s choice is to stay outside conventional society. Not because she insists on being independent or aloof, but out of a combination of fear of how the world look at her and duty to Sylvie whom she genuinely like. Of course this is a coming-of-age story, but it neither involves knocking somebody over, having sex or winning a competition. It is simply about making your life choice.

Even Sylvie is going through, belatedly, a coming-of-age of sorts. While she made the life choice a long time ago to be free, learning to take responsibility for somebody is her growing up.

There is a quiet tone to the movie that I found extremely soothing. Screaming and shouting is at a minimum and instead I get to know these people to an extend rarely seen in Hollywood productions. Sara Walker and Andrea Buchill were both amateur actors and I cannot find that they did anything since and that is such a shame. They are naturals and are very convincing. I felt so much sympathy for Ruth and while that may be intended, the fact that it comes through so powerfully, speaks to her credit.

Obviously, with no studio support, the movie tanked upon release, but in the years since it has won recognition and that is well deserved. I would never have found this movie if not for the List and I am very happy to have watched it. Highly recommended.

 

Broadcast News (1987)

 

Broadcast News

News media is a long-time favourite topic of Hollywood. There seems to be a connection as if producing news is, somehow, closely related to producing movies, and journalists, anchors and editors are the heroes of that battle to keep us informed and entertained and most importantly, keep the news media afloat. “Broadcast News” may have a different angle than “Network”, but much is the same.

Jane Craig (Holly Hunter) is a producer at an (unnamed, but big) network. We learn that she early on excelled at managing chaos to the level of micromanagement, but also that she is a social wreck, likely for the same reason. Her friend at the network is Aaron Altman (Albert Brooks), a journalist with very high standards. They collaborate like a well-oiled machine and off work they use each other to off-load their personal anxieties. The problem here is that Aaron is secretly madly in love with Jane.

Tom Grunick (William Hurt) is a TV face from a local station who is so well liked by viewers that the big network has hired him. Tom is painfully aware that his journalistic credentials are almost non-existent and that he is hopelessly inexperienced. He adores Jane for her skill (and to some extent Aaron too), but Jane has fallen head over heels in love with Tom. Aaron, however, sees Tom both a rival to Jane, but also as an insult to the journalistic quality he represents.

The three work at the hectic network and juggle reports, dinners and jostling for positions. Tom has success as an anchor, but only because he is carefully fed by Jane and Aaron. Aaron gets his chance at anchoring but despite being trained by Tom, fails dismally due to excessive sweating. When the network goes through a restructuring (read: massive layoffs), Jane is promoted, Tom sent to London and Aaron quits and so they all disperse.

The thing that bothered me watching “Broadcast News” was the classic problem of the producers/director/scriptwriter not believing in the core idea of the story and so insisting to fill in a human element (a triangle drama) that ends up taking over the movie, sidelining what was supposed to make the movie special. In the case of this movie there are two interesting themes: News as information versus news as entertainment and Finding your right shelf. Both are interesting, and strong enough to carry the story (at least for me), but instead we get this triangle drama with a lot of shouting that is both enormously trivial and irrelevant to the core themes. Do not get me wrong, they are going about this triangle adventure nicely enough, it is just a very different movie and, myself, I was much more interested in the other themes.

Tom represents the news as entertainment side. He is selling news, he is attracting viewers to the network who are interesting in him personally, more than in the news themselves. For the network it is a commercial arrangement and he brings in viewers. Aaron and to some extent Jane represent the quality of the news, the credibility and relevance of what is presented and in their optic the network serves a public service function, where they as providers of quality news stories are the best qualified to produce that. That of course begs the question, what is quality news? Is it what people wants to see or is it what people should be watching and who decides what that is in the first place? “Broadcast News” opens that discussion but it fizzles and it remains only as identifiers of Tom and Aaron.

Instead, this discussion morphs into the other theme, which seems to say that everybody has their key competence and if you accept and embrace it, you will be happier for it. The network too. When the three of them accept their roles, they can produce quality news that sells and all is good.

“Broadcast News” does carry the label “Romantic comedy-drama”, but whether this is the intent, in which case the triangle drama takes centre stage, or it is a result of what it became, I do not know.

I did enjoy watching the three of them act it out, but for a long time I was confused about what I was looking at, where this was going. It landed, and I suppose it landed okay, but it felt a bit like an emergency landing.

Hunter, Brooks and Hurt are all good. This was an early appearance for Joan Cusack and Jack Nicholson has a small part as well, so, I guess it was a bit of a Hollywood all-stars event.

“Network News” is okay. It is an eighties movie so already there it is a win, but I felt it could have been a lot more.     

Goodbye, Children (Au Revoir Les Enfants) (1987)

 

Au revoir les enfants

In high school (or the Danish equivalent) I had two years of French classes. We watched two movies in those classes: “Le Boucher”, which I did not like and “Au revoir les enfants”. I remember it working very powerfully on me and although I have not watched it again in all these intervening years, I got exactly the same feeling watching it two days ago.

In German occupied France, Julien (Gaspard Manesse), our narrator, is a 12-year-old student at a Catholic boarding school for children of rich parents. This is a boys-only school in a monastery in a small, countryside town, a pocket of life almost detached from a world at war. Yet, the war insinuates itself into the school in small ways. There is a rampant black market, the school is underheated and undersupplied, bomb raids send everybody into the shelters and one day three new children arrive. One of boys is called Jean Bonnet (Raphaël Fejtő) and he starts in Julien’s class.

At first Julien and Jean are rivals. They appear to have similar interests, but Jean is simply better at it than Julien, so he sees him as an intrusion. Jean is however a nice boy, and the rivalry becomes a, first grudgingly, then heartfelt friendship. Julien discovers that Jean has a secret. First of all, his name is not Bonnet at all but Kippelstein, he does not want to eat pork and his claim to be a protestant harmonizes poorly with the strange ceremonies he performs at night (for Shabat). This is where Julien starts wondering what a Jew is and why it is that some people, especially the Germans do not like them.

Things come to a head when the scullion boy, Joseph (François Négret), the prügelknappe of the school, is fired for black marketeering and takes his revenge on the school.

It has been a few days now since I watched the movie and in that time, I have spent a lot of energy trying to formulate what it is I like so much about this movie. The obvious answer is the drama and the heartbreaking ending, but I think it is a lot more than that. Louis Malle, the director whose childhood story this also is, manages to bring us very close to these boys. We understand them, especially Julien, and this life at the boarding school feels very real. The children are neither better nor worse than any other children. The monks are not caricatures, but real people and the effort to create normality in an otherwise broken world for the children, makes them almost heroic in their small way. I think it is this sensation that gets through so well and immerses the viewer into the story.

When disaster strikes, it is both unsentimental and mechanic and also earthshattering. If you can sit through that without horror and a tear in your eye, you are simply made of stone.

The story is largely true, Louis Malle went to a school like this when he was the age of Julien and witnessed three boys and the head of the school, Pere Jacques, Pere Jean in the movie (Philippe Morier-Genoud), being taken away by the Gestapo. The interaction between Julien and Jean is invented, but life on the boarding school feels, and probably is, very real. It is this authenticity that is the great strength of this movie.

“Au revoir les enfant” was nominated to two Academy Awards (Best Foreign language and Best Original Screenplay), but did not win either. It did win a gazillion other prices around the world and found its way into classrooms the world over. I understand why. Beside being a fundamentally good movie, it also puts faces and people on the lost millions in the Holocaust. We cry for Jean Kippelstein and we understand the loss for Julien Quentin.

Highly recommended.