Bull Durham (1988)

 

Bull Durham

I do not know the first thing about baseball. For one, I was born and live on the wrong continent for that sport and secondly, any attempt at grasping it has hit a wall, every time. The rules, the lingo, the names and the concepts, it is all nonsense to me. That is not unique for baseball, I feel the same way for many other sports. American football is an even darker zone. In the case of “Bull Durham” this is a problem because this movie is all about baseball.

Most sports movies are watchable despite the mumbo-jumbo of the sport in question, because they are built on a framework story that goes beyond the particular sport. Here it is a mentorship story (I think). A team called Durham Bulls is playing lousy, but has a talented player, a pitcher I learned it is called, by the name Ebby Calvin LaLoosh (Tim Robbins). As this talent is hiding, the owners (?) of the team has found an older player called Lawrence "Crash" Davis (Kevin Costner) to mentor Ebby. Ebby is not terribly smart and Crash is a bitter man who (I think) did not quite make it, so they are hitting it well.

The love interest of the movie is Annie Savoy (Susan Sarandon) who is some sort of baseball groupie. I did not understand half the things she said, but understood she takes on a new player as lover each season and this one it is either Ebby or Crash. A good chunk of the movie is devoted to this triangle. There is also another girl, Millie (Jenny Robertson), who is less selective who on the team she takes to bed.

Crash’s methods are of course unorthodox, but they work and Ebby, now sporting the name “Nuke” makes it to a big team, which means there is no real need for Crash anymore.

Of course, a lot more happens but I did not understand much of that. The ratio of sports stuff to general stuff is very high here, much higher than normal, which likely pleases fans of the sport to no end, but is frustrating to the rest of us. There is an underlying celebration of fandom to the sport, of people who go all in for it, even if they are no good at it or just spectators. In that sense, it could have been any other sport, now it just happened to be baseball. The characters hang so much of their life, purpose and interest up on the sport and it is as if the movie asks if this is a fantastic thing or perhaps a bit problematic.

I feel it is difficult to discuss the movie, because I am obviously missing so much of it. The decision of Annie to go with Nuke or Crash seems tied to their endeavours in the games... maybe. I sense she sees them as her price, as if she is winning something by having a successful player under her control and, following that, it annoys her no end when they are not complying with her. Maybe that is a lesson to her, maybe she needs to grow up or find something in her life that is less connected to baseball.

Same thing with Crash. The bitterness he feels could be linked to almost making it, but it could also be that he feels manipulated and powerless to avoid or resist the control of other people. The team owners and Annie may here be the same thing, but I could be entirely wrong. In the end, certainly, Crash and Annie seem to find a kindred spirit in each other.

I have no idea if this is a good sports movie. I will let fans of the sport decide that. Susan Sarandon is usually watchable and Costner is... well a matter of taste. I cannot say he is doing anything wrong here. “Bull Durham” is not a movie I remember from my youth, and I would not be surprised if it was never released to cinemas in Europe. Baseball is practically non-existent here. I did not feel much smarter watching it, but I am clearly not the target audience.

 

Working Girl (1988)

 

My wife Wants me to See this: Working Girl

For my new category of “My Wife Wants Me to See This”, my wife recommended me to watch “Working Girl”. She loves “women at work” movies and “Working Girl” is supposed to be the mother of all those movies. Sort of a “The Devil Wears Prada” long before that was a thing.

Tess McGill (Melanie Griffith) is a woman of modest origin who takes the ferry every day from Staten Island to Manhattan to work. We learn early on that she does not hold a job long and that this may have something to do with that she does not accept the bull she gets exposed to. She really wants to climb the corporate ladder but all she gets a chance for are secretary jobs. As an example of the exploitation she is exposed to, she goes to what she thinks is an interview but instead gets hit on by a hot-shot businessman in the shape of Kevin Spacey in a oddly prescient role.

When she lands a job as secretary for the young and powerful Katherine Parker (Sigourney Weaver), Tess thinks this might be different. Katherine speaks very finely about mutual trust and about supporting each other, but when Tess submits an idea to her, Katherine runs with it and claims it as her own. Tess only finds out about it when Katherine breaks her leg skiing in Europe and is away for weeks.

This is where Tess takes it upon herself to exploit her idea and pretends that she is an authority person of the company. She gets a business partner, Jack Trainer (Harrison Ford), who happens to be Katherine’s boyfriend, on board and starts navigating the high seas of finance. This all works surprisingly well until Katerine returns a little before expected.

“Working Girl” is built on the framework of a romantic comedy and a classic eighties version of those. This means that it has story arc, protagonist types, crises and the lightness of tone in common with most rom-coms of this era. There is even a transformation element. It is the content that is filled into this skeleton that makes “Working Girl” special.

The two main elements are the glass ceiling on the workplace and what is permissible in order to break that glass ceiling. Tess hits the glass ceiling in three different ways. She is a woman and in this movie all women except for Katherine Parker are lowly assistants/secretaries while the men are all high-powered businessmen. The patriarchal world order. Secondly, she has training, but her training is not prestigious and without an elite university/college degree, she constantly sees herself bypassed. Thirdly, her background is modest, which is not in itself a problem on the job market, but she is held back to her lowly origin by friends and family. They see her as an opportunist who forgets where she comes from. Which of these elements are the more important is not so relevant. We learn that the combined effect is an almost impossible barrier to breach.

When Katherine breaks the trust and reveals herself to be just as bad, if not worse, than her make counterparts, Tess finds the excuse to bend the rules. How far can you then bend those rules? We understand that Katherine Parker is a bad boss and probably deserves a knock or two, but is it okay what Tess is doing? She is essentially assuming Katherine’s role. She is engaging a business partner (Jack) on what is basically a whim and makes him work long hours for it and she bypasses normal channels to crash a wedding to make her pitch for the potential client. This is not just bending the rules, this is a loose canon running wild. Because this is a movie, we like Tess and allow her more room, but objectively, you must weigh the unfairness of the glass ceiling with the anarchy Tess is unleashing.

Two of her victims, Jack and the client, forgive her with the understanding that the values she represents are good. Hey, why stick to rules if breaking them helps you get somewhere? Yet, there is something disturbing about it. It is a rom-com and the permissible space is larger than in real life, but for many people in the workplace, this is a very real situation and reality is less forgiving.

This is “Working Girl”’s contribution and why this is more than just another romantic comedy. Of course, it helps that it is well acted and fun to watch and certainly one of those movies that are worth repeated views.

My wife identifies quite a bit with Tess McGill and I understand why she loves this movie. I like it too.

 

The Vanishing (Spoorloos) (1988)

 

Spoorloos

“The Vanishing” (“Spoorloos”) was not exactly what I expected it would be. I thought this would be sort of a True Crime thing with a lot of police procedure or perhaps something like the popular TV show (called “Sporløs” in Danish, the direct translation of the Dutch “Spoorloos”) where missing people are traced. The opening may well lead us in that direction, but, man, this takes a left turn!

Rex (Gene Bervoets) and Saskia (Johanna ter Steege) are a young, Dutch couple taking a vacation to France in their shabby old car. We have an early incident where their car runs dry on gas in a tunnel and Rex leaves a screaming Saskia alone to get some fuel (Saskia will not leave without a flashlight). She is upset and Rex promises never to leave her alone again.

They stop at a gas station where Saskia wants to pick up some drinks and she never returns. Rex cannot find her anywhere.

In a normal police procedure movie, we would now start the chase for the missing person. The puzzle, the interviews, the clues. Here, instead, we go straight to the perpetrator, and we are not for a second in doubt he is the guy. In fact, we go some time back in time and learn how Raymond (Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu) slowly practices the abduction. How he tests the drug and time the elements. His early attempts are almost comical as they abort for silly reasons and him being a terrible amateur, but he is persistent and, as we learn, eventually successful. We also learn that he is a family father and to all outward appearance, normal.

Jump three years and Rex is still looking for Saskia. He has a new girlfriend, Lieneke (Gwen Eckhaus), but that is not really working as Saskia is always foremost in his mind. Rex gets postcards from someone who want to meet about the abduction, but that person (Raymond) is never there. Finally, Raymond shows up at Rex apartment in The Netherlands, offering to tell Rex what happened to her, but he must come along with him to France.

This is where the story gets really weird. Along the way, Raymond tells Rex all about why he does things, essentially to prove fate is not inevitable, with plenty of detail from his life. When they get to the fatal rest area where Saskia disappeared three years earlier, Raymond is offering Rex to experience what she did. He just needs to drink a cup of spiked coffee. Yeah...

The point here is that this is not a police procedure film or even about searching for a missing person. Instead, these are two other stories. One is about being so devoted to another person that you will literally do anything for that person, even when it becomes extreme. Rex promised Saskia never to leave her alone again and that is serious business.

The other story is that of a psychopathic murderer who kills from a principle, simply to prove a philosophical point, that he can break destiny. That he also does that with impunity just makes it even more distressing.

This can be classified as a horror movie, partly because the vanishing of a loved one is anybody’s worst nightmare and partly because the manner of the murders is truly horrific. I recently read a short story by Edgar Allan Poe on this very theme, and it gave me the creeps. There is also something very unresolved that adds to the terror. That two people can disappear, and nobody will ever learn what happened to them.

I found it a frustrating movie. I may well recover from the disappointment that it just skipped everything that is cool about a missing person story, but that entire journey to France by Rex and Raymond is totally surreal. Who in their right mind would go along with that? And why on Earth would Rex accept that choice Raymond is giving him? I do not buy that bullshit about Raymond having figured out that Rex must accept. Raymond may think so, but Raymond is nuts. Rex is supposed to be a mentally sound person. It makes no sense.

The surrealism also clashes with the ultra-realism of the filming (or maybe simply becomes extra surreal because of it). The texture of the movie is what you get with a cheap video camera, as if this was found footage rather than design.

“The Vanishing” was intended to be the Dutch submission for the Best Foreign Language Academy Award, but it was rejected because there is more French than Dutch in it. Guess it is not a foreign language then...

I am weirded out by this movie, so I am not certain this is really a recommendation, but it is certainly something different.

 

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Mujeres al Borde de un Ataque de Nervios) (1988)

 

Kvinder på randen af et nervøst sammenbrud

Comedies about people going crazy rarely work for me and that special type of Mediterranean comedy with a lot of shouting and arm-waving tend to just annoy me. “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” (Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios) is both, but to my own surprise it totally works for me.

Pepa (Carmen Maura) is a voice actress of some renown who has been left by her lover, the middle-aged Ivan (Fernando Guillén). She is depressed about it and considers various ways of ending her life, including burning down her apartment. Ivan has broken up on an answering machine and left a message to pack his things in a suitcase. Upset, Pepa tries desperately to contact him, and she spikes a can of gazpacho with sleeping pills to pin him down.

 A friend Candelia (María Barranco) tries desperately to contact Pepa and leaves about a million messages on her answering machine, eventually showing up in person. Candelia has been sleeping with men who then turned out to be Shiite terrorists. Now she is afraid she will be named an accomplice. Pepa though has no surplus to deal with Candelia, until Candelia attempts to jump off the roof-top terrace.

Meanwhile, Ivan’s wife, Lucia (Julieta Serrano), a deranged woman recently released from a mental hospital, is looking for Ivan, convinced he is with Pepa. Her son, Carlos (Antonio Banderas) and his girlfriend, Marissa (Rossy de Palma), coincidentally shows up in the apartment, looking to rent it and Marissa drinks from the spiked gazpacho, falling into deep sleep. Trying to help Candelia, Pepa contacts a lawyer, Paulina (Kiti Mánver), who helped Carlos mother, only to learn, in turn, that Paulina is Ivan’s new girlfriend and they are on the way to Stockholm on the plane targeted by the terrorists.

What a mess.

Writing this synopsis, this all sounds like a soap-opera and I guess it is, except it is all so completely out there absurd, almost like the old sit-com “Soap”. These are all a lot of women going crazy. They are barely keeping it together, worked up as they are by what they perceive as extreme emotional stress. Lucia chasing her philandering husband, Pepa on first losing her lover, then trying to get rid of him, Candelia fearing the police and Paulina, running away with Ivan. Even Marissa, who sleeps through much of the movie is stressing out, not least because she find Carlos asleep with Candelia.

I would normally, as mentioned in the opening, not find this type of comedy funny, but here it is. All these crazy women are navigating in a seemingly normal world that keeps throwing curveballs at them and it is the absurdity of it that generates the comedy. In their own right the characters are actually tragic, it is misfortune that sends them out there on the verge of disaster, but in combination, the craziness becomes hilarious. These women are willing to go pretty far.

The men of the movie are largely uninteresting. Ivan is like the McGuffin, the object this is all about, but an empty cipher. Carlos is busy going the same way and the policemen, taxi driver etc. are merely elements in these women’s crazy situation.

“Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown’” was nominated in the Best Foreign Language category at the Academy awards and made Pedro Aldomodovar internationally known. I am not a big fan of him as a person, but his career has since produced exceptional movies, and this one is one of the best.

I did not expect to like “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown”, but I found myself loving it and it made me laugh. That is a success for a comedy.

Beaches (1988)

 

My wife wants me to see this: Beaches

It is a new year for me, 1988, and the first movie is in the category of “My wife wants me to see this”. The movie is “Beaches” and it is one of her favourite movies. I never saw this movie, so now I am fixing that.

In the frame story, a singer, CC Bloom (Bette Midler), receives a note while rehearsing for a concert. She abruptly leaves the stage and desperately tries to get to San Francisco as fast as possible. Most of the movie consists of her flashbacks while driving north from Los Angeles.

11-year-old Cecilia (CC) meets Hillary Whitney (Barbara Hershey) on a beach in Atlantic City when Hillary is lost and CC is hiding under a boardwalk, smoking. They become instant friends. CC brings Hillary along to an audition and Hillary invites CC into her hotel for an ice cream soda. Hillary returns to San Francisco and over the years they write each other regularly.

Fast forward to them as young women. CC slums it out in Bronx and earns her living on small singing job. Hillary went to college, but is running away from her life in a gilded cage. Showing up in New York, she moves in with CC and for a time they live together. CC gets a break on a small theatre but the director, John Pierce (John Heard), seems more interested in Hillary, which causes some friction. Hillary returns to San Francisco when her father turns ill and stays there afterwards, getting married. Meanwhile, CC marries John and gets her big break on Broadway.

When the girls again reunite, there is a big fall out. Each accusing the other of compromising and they stay out of touch for a while. This changes when Hillary becomes pregnant and catches her prick of a husband cheating and CC is getting divorced and slumming it on terrible jobs.

11 years later Hillary gets a heart condition that dooms her. CC and Hillary’s now 11-year-old daughter Victoria (Grace Johnston) takes care of her in their beach house. The message CC received in the beginning is that Hillary has collapsed.

“Beaches” is a movie about friendship among women. The ups and downs, the ability to be friends despite differences and how important it is to be there for each other. It is natural that this would have a very strong appeal on women and maybe less so for men. As such “Beaches” therefore have a reputation as a “Women’s movie”, which probably explains why it always went under the radar for me, to the extent that I did not even knew it existed until my wife mentioned it.

There are some parallels to the slightly later “Thelma and Louise”, but the drama in “Beaches” is of a more personal sort. CC and Hillary are from opposite ends, literally. Geographically apart, socially apart but also in temper very different women. CC is a loud woman who wears her feelings on her sleave and is constantly looking for attention and confirmation. Hillary is a quiet type who suppresses herself to do what needs to be done and get there through persistence. That such people even has anything to say to each other is a wonder, but that is a point of the movie, that they are complimentary to each other and therefore need the other person in their lives. It is those differences that creates the drama and it is their friendship that enables them to deal with that drama.

The men in the movie are mere tools to this story. Not really import but there to explain elements of their lives. John Heard’s theatre director is the most developed of those, but his function is mostly to explain the character of CC and cause friction between the girls. Most sad is the fate for Dr. Milstein (Spalding Gray), who is there as a brief love interest of CC until she is called back to the stage.

There is no questioning the casting of Bette Midler and Barbara Hershey as the friends in this story. Both are very convincing and Midler, whom I always like, handles the performance parts great. Her character grates on me, but that is likely more me being averse to this sort of extremely extrovert characters. Midler handles that character perfectly.

I am obviously not the target audience of “Beaches” and some of the elements fly by me with little impact, but I do respect and acknowledge what it is trying to do and believe it is doing a good job of that. While I may think it gets a little deep into melodrama and the telenovela genre, my wife tells me it holds up really well and is still a favourite of hers.

Wall Street (1987)

 

Wall Street

It is entirely fitting to review “Wall Street” and “Fatal Attraction” back-to-back. Both are iconic 80’ies movies, both feature Michael Douglas in starring roles and both are concerned with madness. In “Wall Street”, the madness is that of the financial markets.

Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) is working in a stock market company doing cold calls to potential buyers. This is obviously a very junior role and with his fancy education and high ambitions, he is very hungry for more. He dreams of landing one of the big clients and few are bigger than Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas). Fox is very insistent on getting that crucial interview with Gekko, but when he finally gets it, Gekko is unimpressed. Only when supplying inside information on the Bluestar company, where Fox father, Carl Fox (Martin Sheen), works, does Gekko get interested.

Bud Fox lands Gordon Gekko, but on the terms that Fox finds “secret” information, things nobody else knows, to give Gekko an edge. This is highly illegal, but Gekko is very persuasive and Fox is hungry for the wealth and success. Gekko even “grants” him a nice girlfriend, Darien Taylor (Daryl Hannah).

This lasts up to the point where Fox convinces Gekko to invest massively in Bluestar to turn the company around, only to find out that Gekko secretly plans to liquidate the company and cash in on the assets. Fox is not fond of that idea and sets out on a rescue mission.

One thing you need to know about Oliver Stone is that he always makes political movies. He is always going after something and in this case, it is the moral bankruptcy of the financial markets, symbolized by the New York Stock Exchange (Wall Street). Where his political points are sometimes a bit (or a lot) iffy, I would say he got one of his better cases with this portrayal of the players on the financial markets. I am a complete outsider, but whenever I meet these “golden boys”, I get that Gordon Gekko feel, that convinces me that this is not that far fetched. I think Stone was onto something here and that in terms of zeitgeist in the mid-eighties, this was right on target.

The Gordon Gekko character has become a by-word for an amoral financial shark. He is the image we get when we hear or think of crooks in high finance. In the movie he delivers several speeches outlining his extreme capitalist philosophy, which is a Darwinian survival of fittest where fittest mean cunning, daring and most unscrupulous. His speech at the Teldar general assembly is essentially the political program of the extreme liberal right and a defence of raw capitalism. It is delivered to create excitement, and this is how it is received, but when you look at it from a distance, it is truly scary. Douglas won an Academy Award for this portrayal and that was fully deserved.

As in “Fatal Attraction” we have a flawed hero. In “Wall Street”, the temptation is money rather than sex, but the effect is the same. Bud Fox willingly compromises his principles and it is only when his family is threatened that he gets his moral compass set. As Dan in “Fatal Attraction”, it is too late, Bud Fox must face the consequences, but he gets a chance to fight for the right thing. It is a deep hole to climb out from.

Daryl Hannah is a strange cast. She gets top billing, likely because of her name, but she is almost invisible in the movie. She is merely one of the perks Fox gets for working for Gekko. There is no chemistry or enthusiasm, and I get the sense that they could have picked any second-rate actress for this role and not an A-lister.

On the other hand, I was very excited to see John C. McGinley as Fox colleague at the stockbroking company. Ever since “Office Space” I have loved every role he has played. He is awesome and no less here.

I was also very happy to hear Talking Heads “This Must Be the Place” featured twice in the movie.

“Wall Street” is an iconic eighties movie, but it is more that just a symbol or a political manifest. It is actually a really good movie. Highly recommended. This is also my last 1987 movie. On to 1988.

  

Fatal Attraction (1987)

 

Farligt begær

This is a very hard movie for me to watch. Relationship dramas bother me. Triangle dramas in particular and if it involves philandering it gets really bad. Add to this some sweet children and I am shutting down. “Fatal Attraction” hits all the wrong buttons for me and only in the end with its phyco-bitch on the rampage sequence, I am getting partially into the game again. I cannot say exactly why it is so, maybe something for a shrink to look into, but it means that I am prone to disregard all the obvious qualities of the movie and simply hate watching it. I watched it once before and this second time just confirmed everything.

Obviously, I cannot give “Fatal Attraction” a fair review.

Dan (Michael Douglas) and Beth (Anne Archer) Gallagher live in an apartment on Manhattan with their 6-year-old daughter Ellen (Ellen Hamilton Latzen) and a dog. To all appearances a happy family. Dan is an attorney and, in that function, meets Alex Forrest (Glenn Close). During a weekend where the rest of the family is away, Dan has an affair with Alex. It is supposed to be in full understanding that Dan is married, but when Dan tries to leave it, Alex clings on. This will grow progressively more extreme as the movie goes on but starts on a high with her slashing her wrists to make him stay. She shows up at the office, calls him constantly, first at the office then at home. When he changes number, she shows up pretending to want to by their apartment and she claims she is pregnant with his child.

Dan quickly realizes that that he prefers to stay with his family, but Alex wants him and nothing he can do or say to her makes her change her mind. When the family moves upstate to a new home in the countryside, Alex follows them and her attacks on the Gallaghers include kidnapping and a boiled bunny.

Eventually Dan must tell Beth what is going on and that does not go down easily. The family is under assault both from the outside and the inside.

It is possible to convince yourself that this is a movie about a family being terrorized by a crazy psycho-bitch. Fairly straight forward, the woman has been offended and now the family must pay and as she is out of her mind, her attacks are off the scale.

I think this is mostly the extra drama. The real drama is Dan cheating on his wife and this coming back to bite his ass in a big way. A cautionary tale about philandering. In this light, Dan is not the good guy even if he is the central figure. He is the homewrecker who thinks so little of his family that he risks it for a weekend of fun. Alex is mad, but she is also the avenging angel (or demon) of justice to make him pay for his arrogance. Beth and in extension Ellen are the real victims here. They have done nothing to deserve what is happening to them and when she kicks out Dan, I understand her all too well. Asshole.

And then, of course this could be a story about forgiveness. Is a crime is so big it cannot be forgiven, or if forgiveness is a necessity if it is needed for basic survival. Beth will never see Dan in the same light again, but maybe this is part of growing up, leaving innocence behind. Dan is philandering, but she killed somebody.

The tension of the triangle was overwhelming for me. I could watch around 20 minutes before taking breaks, and I feel pathetic for it, but that is what it is. This may be seen as a special achievement of the movie: if there was nothing at stake, why make the movie? But that is a tension for other people to enjoy. For me it was torture.

No doubt this is a movie with many qualities; it was nominated for 6 Oscars including three of the big ones. It is also one of those movies many people will mention as a landmark even today, but please please do not make me watch it again.

The Dead (1987)

 

The Dead

John Huston’s last movie, “The Dead” was directed by him practically on his deathbed and that is important to know when you watch the movie. Very far into the movie, I did not understand the point of it, until I realized that this was Huston’s elaborate farewell.

It is early days in the 20th century, January 1904, in Dublin, Ireland. People are arriving for a party hosted by three spinsters, Kate (Helena Carroll, Julia (Cathleen Delany) and their niece Mary Jane (Ingrid Craige) Morkan. Most of the men appear to be single and at least middle-aged and the female guests mostly music students of the spinsters. Notable exceptions are Molly Ivors (Maria McDermottroe), an activist who leaves the party early, and married couple Gretta (Anjelica Huston) and Gabriel (Donal McCann) Conroy.

The party starts with some dancing to music from the music students and we are introduced to Freddy (Donal Donnelly), who has a reputation for drunkenness and indeed shows up late and drunk, but is tolerated because of his mother. The dancing is replaced by a lengthy dinner through which we are privy to several conversations and finally the guests leave and we follow the Conroys home to their hotel.

Watching this, the point of all this eluded me. It looks like any other upper middle-class dinner party of that era with the more or less empty talk, a few recitations, some music and some singing. Freddy’s interruptions that are too loud, too insisting and with the lack of the sense of situation expected of everybody, is the closest we come to drama. This is blamed on his drunkenness, but I sense autistic traits in his character that makes my heart bleed for him, yet Freddy does not seem to be the point either.

It was only when the Conroy’s were back in their hotel room that the movie came together (and explained the title). This is effectively an eulogy by Huston onto things past and gone, life and a world that is over. It is based on a James Joyce short story, but it could have been written by Huston himself.

Most of the guests live in the past and celebrate the past. They live on what or who they were and act as coming out of an earlier age, not entirely understanding the present world they live in. The poems recited and the songs performed hark back to a world lost and gone. When Gretta hears a particular song upon leaving the party she succumbs to memories of a young lover from her past who sung that song to her and died, maybe because of her. When Gabriel stares out the window on the snowy, dark landscape he appears to be saying his farewell to a world that was and is now dying.

It is in that light, I think, “The Dead” should be watched and while that is a downer, it also feels like a fitting end for Huston himself who died an old man months before the release of “The Dead”. Without this purpose, “The Dead” feels pointless and boring, like those parties you cannot wait to leave, but must stay and endure for the sake of politeness. Luckily it is a fairly short movie, but that did nothing to suppress that feeling. For me personally, it did not help that the copy I watch did not have subtitles which was a problem with the heavy Irish accents of many of the characters. I found myself often consulting Wikipedia to learn if somebody said something important, which they invariably did not.

I would like to say it is a beautiful movie, but I think that is a stretch. It has a beautiful and poignant point, but is mostly a movie to endure rather than enjoy. Calling it boring is harsh, but let is just say I was happy it was short.

  

800 Movie Anniversary

 

800 Movie Anniversary

I have now reached the 800 movie mark on the List. Of course, with all the extra movies I am reviewing I am actually long past that point, but counting official entries, this is where I am now. I passed 700 on October 12th, 2023, so it has taken me two and a half years to climb this interval. Not very impressive, really.

On the other hand, I am really enjoying being immersed in the eighties. To me, this is a golden age in so many ways, not least because this was my formative childhood. I therefore decided that the awards I will make this time is for movies that encapsulates the eighties one way or another. This was a hard pick, and I had to keep telling myself that this is more about zeitgeist than quality. My top-10 list of movies would look quite different. Also I stopped at 87. This is after all as far as I got on the List.

 

10. The Terminator

What was the eighties without the buff duel between Arnie and Sly? The Terminator perhaps best represents this.

11. E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial

E.T. may be the quintessential family film of the eighties. The optimistic note of the movie is so typical eighties that you probably could not have made it at any other time. Project Hail Mary owes a lot to E.T.

8. A Nightmare on Elm Street

While this may not be the best horror-gore movie of the eighties, it perhaps best typifies the genre and Friday, the 13th is not on the List.

7. Dirty Dancing

Dirty Dancing is not on the List, and it does not even take place in the eighties, but it is sooooo eighties! The music, the mood, the message, the structure. This is the very definition of a romantic song and dance movie of the eighties.

6. Ghostbusters

The eighties were super strong on comedies, and few did it better than Ghostbusters. The special thing about Ghostbusters is how rooted it is in the eighties. Not only does it run the standard eighties formula, it is also full of the pop-culture of the eighties.

5. Raiders of the Lost Ark

Here I was a bit in doubt. The Indiana Jones franchise takes place in the past, but this is very much a movie of its time. You could say it is the eighties displaced to the thirties and maybe a case of the movie being so big that it made the eighties. Certainly, the decade is full of more or less successful copies.

4. Beverly Hills Cop

If Ghostbusters is not the most quintessential eighties comedy, then it must be Beverly Hills Cup. Murphy’s Axel Foley takes the ride from the seventies in Detroit and land in ultra hip eighties LA. The decade is almost the main character.

3. Top Gun

Top Gun is a good example that being very eighties is not necessarily a good thing. This is so eighties, it is a hoot. It is almost a mockery of an eighties movie if I was not convinced they actually meant it seriously.

2. Back to the Future

Again, a movie that mostly takes place in another time, but by juxtapositioning the eighties against the fifties it manages to very effectively highlight the eighties. This is literally displacing eighties characters into the past.

1.     1. The Breakfast Club

If you were young in the eighties, there is a very good chance this was the movie that formed you. No other movie I can think of encapsulates being young in the eighties as The Breakfast Club does.

 

I had a thought to place Blade Runner on the top-10. In high school, this was the movie highlighted as representing the post-modern style in cinema, something typical of the eighties, but thinking about it, Blade Runner was so far ahead of its time that it should belong to a complexly different decade. At least the nineties or even later.

 

Red Sorghum (Hong Gao Liang) (1987)

 

Red Sorghum

“Red Sorghum” is a Chinese film. Not a Hong Kong production, but a movie from mainland China. This is from a period where the technical capabilities became absolutely comparable with what was made elsewhere, but when there is still a political imperative that is not to be avoided. Combining these two elements we get a movie that is cryptic, interesting and ham-fisted at the same time.

The narrator of the story, whose voice appear from time to time in the movie, tells us that this is a story about his grandparents. Evidently it takes place in the period of the 1920’es to the 1940’es, which makes it prior to communist takeover and at least in the latter part during the Japanese occupation. His grandmother, Jiu (Gong Li) is sent off to marry a rich winery owner who also happens to suffer from leprosy. Needless to say, Jiu is not happy about this. One of the employees at the winery, whom the narrator names his grandfather, but whose name in the movie I forgot (Jiang Wen), takes an interest in Jiu. He sleeps with her in something that to me looks a bit like rape and it is implied that he may be the one killing the winery owner. In any case a sort of anti-hero.

Jiu takes over the winery and starts running it a bit like a cooperative, but with her as executive lead. Sort of the Chinese communist ideal. There is some story about Grandfather getting drunk, telling everybody he has a claim on Jiu, then when Jiu gets kidnapped by bandits he rage on them and after that, being angry he pees in the wine, which, curiously turns it really good (I guess I want to avoid Chinese sorghum wine...).

When some years later the Japanese arrive, they abuse the local population and demonstrate cruelty on a level where the winery commune forms a resistance cell to fight off the Japanese. The narrator’s father, a little boy loses his mother in the fight and is left with his grandfather.

The red sorghum of the title refers to the fields of red sorghum surrounding the winery. It is tall and mysterious, hiding things and is the source of the sorghum wine they are producing.

The general story is one that fits in very well with the communist China narrative. The local countryside population is suffering under greedy landowners. That the winery owner is suffering from leprosy represents the rot of the wealthy class. His death is the revolution and the winery, a mini-China forms a cooperative under gentle and loving, but firm leadership. The winery employees must be educated. The Japanese invasion was both a real, formative event for China, but also represents the external threat that China / the winery needs to defend against and to make sacrifices for in the process. The grandfather is the re-educated Chinese helping the young generation into a future.

This is rather ham-fisted and would in itself, perhaps, be uninteresting to a western viewer. What makes “Red Sorghum” interesting after all is how it presents itself. There is a production quality underlying this movie that makes it astonishing to look at. The big sorghum fields, the sun-parched winery, the endless skies and the construction of the setting of the movie. There are also impressive and convincing performances all around. Especially by Gong Li, who would develop into one of the biggest Chinese actresses, at least seen from a western perspective, but also all-round by the staff on the winery. I sometimes feel watching Hong Kong movies a disconnect from reality as if actors are acting that they are acting, if that makes sense. This is absent in “Red Sorghum” and the naturalistic acting here as far more convincing. Director Zhang Yimou would become one of the premier directors of China and this is his promising beginning.

Yet, all this is still very Chinese and while I understand the overall picture, I feel that so much is lost in the cultural translation. There are odd elements, things that are said or done and contexts that makes little sense to me. I lived in China for half a year back in 2008, so I recognize these things as Chinese idiosyncrasies, but they still baffle me. I therefore cannot say that I fully understand the movie and indeed I felt lost at times, but that is, I suppose, to be expected.

Despite that, this is a movie worth spending time on, if for nothing else than to enjoy the spectacle and the window into a transitional period of China, whether is be the 1920-40’ies or the 1980’es.

 

Moonstruck (1987)

 

Lunefulde måne

Laughing at exaggerated cultural stereotypes is not exactly acceptable in this day and age, but it was in, apparently, in the eighties and “Moonstruck” goes all in. As in everything is permissible as long as we understand this is a comedy.

We are in the Italian community of New York and Loretta Castorini (Cher) is a 37-year-old widower who lives at home with her parents, Cosmo (Vincent Gardenia) and Rose Castorini (Olympia Dukakis), her grandfather (Feodor Chaliapin) and perhaps a few more family members, this is not entirely clear to me. Loretta is convinced that it was bad luck that caused her first husband to die after only two years, so when her boyfriend Johnny Cammareri (Danny Aiello) propose to her, she insists that everything must be done according to the traditions. Johnny just needs to go back to Sicily to tell his dying mother about the marriage.

Meanwhile, Loretta promises to seek out Johnny’s brother Ronni (Nicholas Cage) to settle a five-year-old feud so he can attend the wedding. Ronni is VERY upset. He blames Johnny for ruining his life by distracting him, so he lost his hand in a meat slicer. It is five years ago, but to Ronni it is like yesterday. Loretta’s attempt at placating Ronni develops into... an affair. All of a sudden, Loretta is invited to a date at the Opera and going through a makeover to look a little more like... Cher. At the Opera, Loretta meets her father with a woman who is definitely not her mother, while at home Rose meet a university teacher who we have already seen twice being ditched by a student date.

Truly a messy situation and in any other connection, this sounds like the recipe for a family meltdown. Alas, this is an Italian family, so we are to understand that this sort of thing happens all the time, it takes a bit (lot) of shouting and then everybody are happy again. It is natural to give into your passions as long as you remember family is important and everybody actually love each other even when they are throwing things at each other.

I am Scandinavian and this mentality is... rather far away from me, but I think that is the point here. These Italian Americans are described with emphasis on all these cultural stereotypes, so far over the top that most people, maybe even Italians, would find them crazy and amusing. This is cultural stereotypes as a joke. Italians are a bit crooky, full of passion, screaming their lungs out, intense lovers and family people above all and here it is used for comedy.

The crazy thing is that it is totally working. This is hilariously funny. Somewhere between the absurdity and the recognizable, we can both follow the characters and are completely left by the wayside by their crazy lives. The movie is obviously made with a sympathetic eye to Italian culture, and it is laughing with, more than laughing at, the Italians, which leaves a feel-good taste where this could have been really bad. I had a great time watching this and that was totally unexpected.

This feels like an Italian version of “My Big, Fat, Greek Wedding” in that the comedy is almost entirely based on extreme cultural stereotypes, but “Moonstruck” is a cleaner movie in that it almost entirely dispenses with plot and focuses of this particular situation across just two or three days. It gives the movie more time to focus on the characters and that is to the benefit of the movie.

Cher is almost the only actor without an Italian background, but she pulls it off surprisingly well. I believe her to be Italian. Her only problem is that her Cinderella transformation is not so convincing when she already looks very pretty before it happens. Cage reminded me of his character in “Raising Arizona”. He is rather good when he is a maniac. It is when he is supposed to be sincere, he gets unconvincing.

I had no idea what I went into here and that is that best way to approach a movie, no expectations at all. Here I was highly rewarded and had a good time watching it.

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.

Adventures in Babysitting (1987)

Adventures in Babysitting

I am introducing a new category here on my blog. It is called “My wife wants me to see this”. As I am progressing up through the eighties, my wife supplies me with a lot of ideas for movies to watch. So many in fact that she has now earned her own category. It is still me who watch and review the movie, but they are her picks.

The first entry on that list is “Adventures in Babysitting”.

Chris Parker (Elisabeth Shue) is a 17 year old high school student who earns a bit of money doing babysitting. When her boyfriend cancels on her, she instead accepts a job sitting for Brad (Keith Coogan) and Sara (Maia Brewton). Brad is 15 years old and has a crush on Chris. His friend Daryl (Anthony Rapp), who joins the party, finds there is a striking similarity between Chris and Playboy’s March centrefold. Sara is much younger and a daredevil who idolizes Thor (god or superhero).

The evening quickly takes a left turn when Chris’ friend, Brenda (Penelope Ann Miller), calls in panic from a bus station downtown Chicago. She has run away from home but regrets and wants Chris to pick her up. With the children in tow, Chris drives from the suburbs into town. This turns out to be quite an odyssey.

Through a number of strange coincidences, a puncture turning into being caught in a shooting, then in a car theft, to being prisoners of a local gang who steals muscle-cars and distribute them nationwide. They make a spectacular escape, but Daryl, wanting a replacement for his lost Playboy magazine, steals the gangster’s copy. This pisses them off. Not because they like the magazine but because it is filled with incriminating notes of their dealings. Now Chris must keep track of her charges, find Brenda and avoid getting caught by gangsters.

“Adventures in Babysitting” taps into a number of overlapping genres that were very popular in the eighties and early nineties. There is the “crazy things happen with the babysitter” theme as well as the “Children/teens from the suburbs encountering the menacing city” and of course the chase movie. “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”, “Uncle Buck” and “Home Alone” are all in this family of movies. They make up the quintessential eighties family movie and that is exactly where we are with “Adventures in Babysitting”. The only surprise is that John Hughes is not involved in it. And that I never watched if before my wife made me aware of it.

There is an innocence to “Adventures in Babysitting” that is very eighties (and also unmistakeably Disneyesque). With a sole exception (Sara walking on the outside of a skyscraper) it never gets truly dangerous and the bad guys have a tendency to fumble. The teenagers skirt the topic of sex, but stops short of anything actually happening. That may sound boring and once you start noticing, a little annoying, but in this eighties fantasy it gets away with it, the same way “Home Alone” got away with the horrible nightmare of a small child forgotten at home over the holidays. Sometimes the fantasy elements takes the story off on some strange tangents, such a the blues bar scene or the strange tow-truck guy, but it works because it is an adventure and through the children’s eyes everything here is an adventure anyway.

It is difficult not to be charmed by “Adventures in Babysitting”. It is not top quality and it does venture into a lot of cliché’s and completely unlikely coincidences, but it is also fun and if you, like me, love thar eighties vibe, then it is difficult to be hard on this movie. It is a good time in the sofa Sunday afternoon. And Elisabeth Shue was a big thing back then.