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

 

Une Histoire de vent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    

Die Hard (1988)

 

Die Hard

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yippie-kai-yeah!

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

 

Landscape in the Mist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Grave of the Fireflies

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

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

That sort of sets the stage.

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

Dangerous Liaisons (1988)

 

Dangerous Liaisons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   

RoboCop (1987)

 

RoboCop

“RoboCop” is one of the weirder gaps in my movie experience. I have known about Robocop since it came out and have been watching enough clips from it to recognize it, but I believe I have never actually sat down to watch it. That is, until now. I cannot say why. Teenage me would have loved this movie.

In future Detroit, the city looks like shit, and the police is run as an investment by a large corporation. So far, this is not too much of a stretch. Being an officer on the street is dangerous business. Standard equipment includes helmet and body armour, and the casualty rate is still high. Alex Murphy (Peter Weller) has just transferred to a hard-hit downtown precinct and on his first patrol with officer Anne Lewis (Nancy Allen) he gets captured and shot by a particularly vicious gang led by Clarence Boddicker (Kurtwood Smith). Somehow, he survives long enough to be salvaged by a development team under Omni Consumer Products (OCP) to be incorporated into their new super cop cyborg: RoboCop.

OCP is the big corporation than owns the police. In fact, they seem to own most of everything in Detroit, but it is also subject to internal power struggles. The department outfitting the Robocop prototype, led by Rob Morton (Miguel Ferrer) is rivalling a group headed Dick Jones (Ronny Cox), who is developing a robot named ED-209. Not entirely surprisingly, Dick Jones is allied with Clarence Boddicker. It is into this fray the incorruptible supercop enters with determined and unquestioning steps.

RoboCop is the corporate solution to law enforcement. Highly efficient, no salary, long working hours and no pestering union. An employee who simply does the job. Should it get hurt and die it is not really a problem because it is already technically dead. All this is of course a big issue for the actual police force in the precinct and in these AI times, this conflict is easily the most interesting in the movie. Unfortunately, it is not getting anywhere enough space in the movie and that is a real shame. Instead, the focus is on the corruption at the very top, which provide us with a lot of noisy and very violent action. The question here is how does a square thinking machine react when the very source of its orders is the problem. There is some philosophy here and it gets a bit more space. Finally, there is the question of how much humanity is left in the cyborg. Does it still identify as the original human or is it entirely disconnected from it. As the movie progresses, more and more of its humanity is surfacing, but besides making RoboCop more sympathetic, more human if you like, it is a bit difficult to see where that story element is leading.

At the end of the day, RoboCop is an action movie, and it is the action sequences everything else must eventually make way for. It is a good action movie. Verhoeven, the director, is known for not pulling any punches and here he is going all in. In fact, “RoboCop” does feel more modern than its age, and that is largely because the violence is so much in your face. The is not “The A-Team” where nobody seem able to hit their target, but unflinching and merciless violence. A part of me is saddened that it is this sort of violence that makes it feel modern.

The brutality is strangely offset by a dark humour that at times is so silly that it almost derails the movie. The competing robot, the ED-209 is so brutally overpowered and insanely incompetent that it is darkly funny but also difficult to take it serious as a competitor to the RoboCop. Broadcasts are interrupted by absolutely insane commercials for products such as a boardgame where you nuke your family.

Taken apart, “RoboCop” sounds like a mess, but it actually works. I would personally have preferred a movie that would follow through with some of the many very interesting ideas the story presents instead just reducing itself to an action movie, but I suppose that would require a TV-series to realize that and there “RoboCop” is 20-30 ahead of its time. Today, such a series would be both possible and absolutely work.

I still do not understand why I did not watch “RoboCop” back in the day. It is possible the world needed to catch up with it.

Big (1988)

 

Big

It is not a secret that “Big” is a long-time family favourite in our home. Both my wife and I love it, we acquired the DVD early in our marriage and we have watched it a gazillion times over the years. I am therefore totally biased here and will be completely unresponsive to critique.

“Big” is a play on the What-would-you-do-if-your-wish-came-true theme. In this case it is as simple a child wishing he was big as in not a child anymore. Josh Baskin (David Moscow) is a 13-year-old boy, living a normal suburban life with his family and best friend Billy (Jared Rushton). At the town fair, Josh wants to impress a girl but is rejected at the ride for being too short. Humiliated, Josh makes a with at a Zoltar machine that he was big and his wish is granted. The next morning, Josh is an adult (Tom Hanks) with all the complications that entails.

Josh’ mother (Mercedes Ruehl) freaks out and does not recognize Josh. Billy takes some convincing, but comes around and together they decide Josh should hang out in the city (New York) until they can find a Zoltan machine to turn Josh back to child size. When this appears to require some time and they are short on cash, Josh will also need a job. He finds one as a computer operator at a toy company. It is a universal truth that young people are more tech savvy than adults and nobody understands toys like a child so Josh is a fish in the water. Before long Josh is VP of product development with his own office and secretary.

One of the truly amazing things about “Big” is how believable Tom Hanks is as the 13-year-old Josh in an adult body. His facial expressions, body language and way of talking is exactly like David Moscow’s and what we see is really a young teenager trying to get along in an adult world. It is heartbreaking to see him curl and cry up on the mattress in the seedy hotel he is staying at. When he enters the big toy store Macmillan owns, he is in a child’s heaven and starts playing with everything, forgetting he is supposed to be an adult. Even when Macmillan himself (Robert Loggia) shows up, it is difficult to get back into the role of a grown up and, discovering the walking piano, he forgets it altogether and needs to play. This is the iconic scene everybody knows from the movie, two adults jumping around on the keys. This entire part of the movie is filled with these child-encounters-the-adult-world events. Josh at the company party, Josh’ new loft apartment, which is more like a playground, Josh attending business meetings and playing paddle with a man who sees him as an enemy.

The longer Josh stays in this world, the more he grows up and the real turning point is his first sexual encounter with the mercenary Susan Lawrence (Elizabeth Perkins). This is also the part many people have a problem with. Susan acts in good faith. To her, Josh is a bona fide adult with a boyish charm, the entire opposite of her former boyfriend. We know that Josh has started thinking of girls, so entering this world is a magic dream, but also one he is entirely unequipped to deal with. We know Susan is having an affair with an underage boy, but she does not. When she eventually realises this, she does act accordingly, she is no paedophile. To me, this is also what saves it. To none of the involved there is an intent of doing something creepy.

Josh is being sucked into the adult world and it takes a wake-up call or two to realize what it is he is missing out on and to know he must get back. Being an adult for a few months was quite an experience but he will get there soon enough.

This is an endearing movie, partly because of the way it is told, but mainly through Tom Hank’s entirely convincing performance, one he was nominated for at the Academy Awards. Early in the development, adult Josh was supposed to have been performed by Robert de Niro. That would have been a very different movie, and I am happy it ended up with Tom Hanks. This is a movie that works at all age levels, and each age group will see something else in it. Yet, the relationship between Susan and Josh, key as it is to the story, has seriously threatened the reputation of “Big”. I understand where that position is coming from, but I do not share it. It is a (scary) part of the adult experience, and it is dealt with with sensitivity. There is not evil intent, and it convinces Josh this is all too early for him. Yet, there is no way this could have been made today.

Beetlejuice (1988)

 

Off-List: Beetlejuice

If you are a ghost and somebody have moved into your beloved old home and are making a mess of things, who’re you gonna call? Ghostbu... no no... Betelgeuse! (or Beetlejuice if you are so inclined). This fantastic and hilarious reverse of ”Ghostbusters” is my third off-List movie for 1988.

The Maitlands, Barbara and Adam (Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin), live in a cozy country house in Connecticut when they have the misfortune to die in a car accident. They are slow to realize they are dead and even slower to work out what that implies as the “Handbook for the Newly Deceased” is particularly cryptic. They do realize they cannot leave the house without ending up on Saturn’s moon Titan, which is infested with colourful sandworms.

Their second disaster is the new owners of the house, the Deetz’es, Delia and Charles (Catherine O’Hara and Jeffrey Jones) and Charles’ daughter Lydia (Winona Ryder). Charles is a developer looking for a quiet place while Delia is a sculpturer and very impressed with herself. Lydia is a goth girl living in perpetual misery. With those parents I am not certain I blame her. Delia’s art friend, agent or leech, Otho (Glenn Shadix), practically moves in with them. Right from day one they are busy changing the house in the most horrendous, but likely fashionable, way and the Maitlands want them out. The only place they have for themselves is the attic.

Lydia befriends the Maitlands as she is the only one who can see them and when their first serious attempt to scare them away fails (the famous Banana Boat Song scene), Lydia becomes the unwilling intermediary as the Deetz’es see great possibilities in a haunted house. It is time to get serious so, against advice from their caseworker, the Maitlands summon Betelgeuse (Michael Keaton) and this is where it gets really funny.

I was surprised how late in the movie Betelgeuse appears. I recall it as much earlier, but it is really only the last 20 minutes or so we get the fireworks which this bio-exterminator is. Sure, he pops up before, but only as hardly more than a mention. Betelgeuse is what everybody remembers from this movie and Keaton went all in on this character. He is repulsive and offensive, but also a hilariously funny clown. The uncle nobody wants to invite to the party, but all the children love. Well, who all the adolescent boys love.

It is true that the movie pulls into high gear when Keaton shows up, but what we forget is that this is already quite a feast. The Otho character is so sleazy and slimy that he is a hoot, and Jones did everything right back then in the eighties. Despite Keaton, my favourite scene of the movie is the Banana Boat Song sequence. Watching those pompous narcissistic bozos succumb to the song is always a laugh for me and it was heavily referenced in the sequel. The Maitlands’ visits to the afterlife are also legend. This messy place that looks like a Kafkaesque nightmare is all we fear about public sector bureaucracy. Being number 1000000 in the queue, a caseworker who do not have time for you. Paper and dust everywhere. Regulations nobody understand and catch-22s that means you are pretty much stuck. Dying sucks because this is where you end up.

Ryder’s Lydia is the heart of the movie, and she is fine and everything, but in this party everybody is having she is drowning out a bit. Her function is mainly as the only truly sane person among all these weirdos, the sounding box to make everybody else funny.

Only recently a sequel was made (it took 36 years!) and despite my fears of the opposite, it works surprisingly well. Keaton’s Betelgeuse gets a far more prominent role in that one, but it is otherwise faithful to the original. It works well as a double feature to watch them together.

“Beetlejuice” carries all the hallmarks of Tim Burton, the primary colours, the imagination and the larger than life characters and the crazy thing is, this was only his second feature. I would add this to the List without hesitation.

 

 

The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad (1988)

 

Høj pistolføring

When the latest “Naked Gun” movie came out last year I was greatly disappointed. Had I become so old that the spoof movies of the eighties had become too stupid for me and lost their charm? I immediately went home and put on the original and to my great relief I had not lost the love, it was the genre that had gotten stupid. It is a year later, I am watching it again and I am still laughing.

“The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!” follows in the footsteps of “Airplane!”. It takes a well-known genre, in this case the police procedure movie, and makes a joke out of everything. And I mean everything. Sometimes there are multiple jokes happening at the same time, sometime the joke is in the way of the story and so the story must pause and no joke is too silly. While not every joke works, enough does and they have enough freshness and charm to be more than just silly.

There is a frame story, though not a terribly important one. Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielsen) is a police lieutenant who on his return from beating up the top bad guys in the world, finds that his colleague Nordberg (O.J. Simpson) has been badly injured. Also, his wife married someone else. Nordberg was shot six times, touched a hot stove, leaned on a newly painted door, fell into a wedding cake, stepped in a bear trap and fell out of a window of a ship into the harbour. Beside looking for the culprits, Drebin is also involved in the security detail for the British queen’s visit to L.A. We know early on that Vincent Ludwig (Ricardo Montalbán) is the bad guy, but as he is also a locally important businessman and host for the queen, Drebin is making difficult enemies. Luckily, Ludwig has a pretty assistant, Jane Spence (Priscilla Presley), who also like policemen.

If you know who Leslie Nielsen is, it will not be a surprise that Lt. Drebin is a complete disaster. He can hardly open a door without somebody getting hurt and he has this face that looks completely oblivious to the effect he has on his surroundings. Combining this character to the very low but also strangely innocent humour of the team from “Airplane!” is dynamite. Or at least it was back then when they were at their peak. A silly joke like Drebin having his microphone open when he goes to the bathroom during a press conference on the visit of the Queen works every time I watch it. I know it should not, farting jokes are not that funny, but with Leslie Nielsen it is hilarious.

What happened later with this genre was that it was forgotten that any comedy only works if you have a sounding board of normality. If everything is anarchy it is simply not funny anymore. Even the Marx Brothers knew this and used the awesome Margaret Dumont for that purpose. “The Naked Gun” tries to hang on to its “normal” frame story and it has a degree or normality in the world Drebin operates in. Not a lot, but just enough. Mayor Barkley (Nancy Marchand) is such a character as is (to some degree) Drebin’s boss Captain Hocken (George Kennedy). It is a tenuous grip on normality. When the movie is poorest it is because it is slipping away, but when the movie is best it is because the joke is up against normality as when Drebin takes over the role of a famous opera singer and abuse the national anthem at a big baseball game in front of an amazed audience. We see (and hear) Nielsen, but he is funny because of the audience.

The spoof genre continued for many years and got worse and worse. It is not that the jokes were sillier than here, but because the sounding board disappeared. When, finally, “Naked Gun”, 2025 came around, it was just dumb.

The original, though, is a lot of fun. Do not expect too much, just have a good time. Pretty much like you would with “Airplane!”. I love it.

 

A Fish Called Wanda (1988)

 

A Fish Called Wanda

I remember vividly watching “A Fish Called Wanda” the first time. I was in eighth grade, and my class was going to England to spend a week with British host families. In those days, the cheap way to go to the UK was an overnight ferry from Esbjerg to Harwich. We were a group who watched “A Fish Called Wanda” in the ship’s cinema. Midway through the movie there was a blackout. The ship lost power and lay still in the water for an hour before we could continue the movie. That sort of thing makes an impression on a 14-year-old.

“A Fish Called Wanda” is not so much a caper movie as about what happens after the heist. The gang has four members, the leader George (Tom Georgeson), his girlfriend Wanda (Jamie Lee Curtis), her lover and team gunman Otto (Kevin Kline) and right-hand man Ken (Michael Palin). Minutes after the heist, it becomes clear that nobody trusts anybody. George moves the loot (some very valuable diamonds), he entrusts their location to Ken, while  Wanda and Otto call the police to report George who is immediately arrested. Wanda is playing everybody, being lover of George, secret lover of Otto, friend with Ken and, when she learns he is the barrister of George, tries to become friendly with Archie Leach (John Cleese). Archie is, in his turn, living a fairly boring, if comfortable, life under the boot of his rich wife, Wendy (Maria Aitken). When he is approached by the vivacious Wanda, a whole new world opens up to the repressed, middle-aged barrister.

This is a comedy and it plays hard for comedy, though less so in the beginning. It is a fairly slow starter where the pieces need to be set up. It does not take long though to work out that Otto is an imbecile with an inflated ego. As an American with a very high opinion of himself he hates the British, though not as much as when people call him stupid or tries to cheat on him. He is the source of much, if not most, of the comedy here. There is a running joke with him being incredibly jealous of anybody getting close to Wanda and with Wanda using her female charms on practically everybody, this happens a lot. Wanda meets with Archie several times and whenever she does, Otto will appear, looking in through a window or suddenly be in the room. Those are my favourite scenes of the movie. When Wanda and Archie, in an embrace, are deriding Otto for his stupidity, Otto’s head suddenly appear next to the bed, saying: “Do not call me stupid!”. I almost fell off the sofa laughing.

Kevin Kline is funny here because he has been built op throughout the movie so his fumbling around and idiotic appearances becomes a trigger for comedy. Just seeing him, we know it will be crazy. It is a bit less so with the sensitive, animal-loving Ken with a stutter. He is tasked with getting rid of an elderly woman who were able to identify George during their getaway. His attempts at her life invariably fail as he ends up killing one of her dogs instead each time. Much to his own chagrin. As a 14-year-old this was incredibly funny. Less so now. It is when Ken has his encounters with Otto it becomes hilarious. Otto pretends to be gay and makes passes on Ken, and, towards the end tortures Ken to reveal the location of the loot by sticking up chips in his nostrils and eating his beloved fish.

“A Fish Called Wanda” is very much a John Cleese project. With Michael Palin on board there is a hint of the old Monty Python vibe, but this in not the anarchy of MP, not is it the zany world of Fawlty Towers. There is a grounding here in reality that at first seem to take the fun out of the movie, but eventually becomes the sounding board at which the crazy elements are thrown. Archie would not be half as fun without Wendy. Otto is hilarious because he operates in an otherwise sane world. Cleese’ Archie is a central character, but through much of the movie he is the stooge rather than a protagonist and it is often difficult to recognize the unhinged Basil Fawlty in the repressed lawyer. As a Cleese fan, this is a bit disappointing.

As for Jamie Lee Curtis, I always had a bit of a problem with her in this movie. She is a great actress, and I have watched lots of movies where I loved her and her stunts, but I simply cannot make her that femme fatale she is supposed to be here. Something does not ring entirely true.

A few anecdotes: Archie Leach is the actual name of Cary Grant, and he came from a location (or very close to) used in the movie. Coincidence? During a showing of the movie in Denmark, an elderly gentleman in the audience died from laughter. He laughed so hard he got himself a heart attack. The deadly joke of MP?

At the Academy awards “A Fish Called Wanda” was nominated for Best Director (Charles Crichton) and Best Original Screenplay (John Cleese) and, very deservedly, won Best Supporting Actor (Kevin Kline). Kline being the absolute reason this is a big recommendation from me.

 

My Neighbor Totoro (1988)

 

Off-List: My Neighbor Totoro

1988 is one of those years where there is so much good and interesting stuff to add to the List, yet when I noticed “My Neighbor Totoro” was a 1988 movie, I was not in doubt I had to add this one. There are a few Ghibli movies on the list, but, surprisingly, not this one and that despite when you look for Ghibli merchandize, the Totoro figures are the most iconic ones. Did I mention my son is an avid fan of everything Ghibli?

“My Neighbor Totoro” takes place in rural Japan, sometime in the fifties. A university teacher, Kusakabe, and his two children, pre-teen Satsuki and four-year-old Mei, are moving into an old, deserted house. The mother is in the hospital during the entire movie, suffering from some illness that keeps her there and is a constant worry for the family.

The story is very much seen from the eye-height of the two children. They are very energetic, everything they do seem to happen at a frenetic pace, and they have a lively imagination. When they believe they see something, the father is not rejecting it, but plays along. The girls see soot-mites escaping into crevices when they open doors to deserted rooms and rather than being afraid, they take delight in it. They are also spotting (Mei first, then later Satsuki as well) strange creatures dropping acorns in the house and the garden. Mei, following the creatures into a thicket surrounding a giant tree, ends up with a gigantic, furry creature who seems benign and says just one word, “Totoro”. Later, while waiting for a bus to meet her father, Satsuki also meets Totoro. He is simply standing next to her in the iconic image at the bus stop. She lends him an umbrella, and he gets on a gigantic cat bus before her father arrives.

A few days later there is a telegram to contact the hospital immediately. The girls worry something has happened to their mother. Satsuki tries to get hold on their father while Mei simply wanders off towards the hospital. Satsuki is upset Mei is lost but gets help from Totoro and the catbus to find Mei and then get to the hospital. The girls do not enter, but the parents find an ear of corn with a message from the girls on the windowsill.

Miyazaki combines a number of his classic elements in this movie. First of all, there is the world as viewed from the eye height of a child which both involves what is important to a child but also the magic that the child sees in the world. Another element is nostalgia for a time past. Miyazaki is taking us back to his own childhood where he moved from the city to rural Japan and the world he met there. Something he would reference a lot in “The Boy and the Heron”. Finally, the animistic spiritual world of nature plays a large part in “My Neighbor Totoro”. The world the girls see is not just their imagination, but a spiritual grey-zone where they are in touch with forces in nature that are very much part of traditional Shinto beliefs. Not that Totoro himself is a Shinto deity, but Shinto allows for nature spirits that you need to respect. Both “Princess Mononoke” and “Spirited Away” go down that road in a big way.

The girls seem to be allowed access to this world because the possibilities are never denied them. Where other parents may be keen remove such fanciful thoughts from the children, the father and the local old woman known as Granny never deny the girls’ claims and even encourage it. If the girls had been very sad about moving to the countryside, the magic world could be an escape, but that is not the case at all. Instead, the magic is part of the excitement of moving to the countryside and for the girls simply an extra dimension to be in. This world does offer help when they need it, but as an ability, not as an escape. In this way the nature-spiritual world is not a crutch but a bonus and an altogether much more positive thing.

As all Ghibli movies, “My Neighbor Totoro” is on the surface a children’s movie, but one with messages to adults as well. It seems to lack a plot, but that is because it is so much more focused on a state of things. This is less about overcoming a story-arch crisis as about achieving a communion with a spiritual reality.

Finally, not to forget, “My Neighbor Totoro” is a beautifully drawn movie. As in all Miyazaki’s movies the backgrounds are hand drawn to exquisite perfection. Totoro is now an iconic Ghibli creature, and I think many children all over the world are very familiar with it.

“My Neighbor Totoro” is a necessary watch in the Studio Ghibli universe and I highly recommend it.

   

Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie (Hotel Terminus: Klaus Barbie sa Vie et Son Temps) (1988)

 

Hotel Terminus: The life and Times of Klaus Barbie

For a while I thought this would be the first time I had to give up finding a movie on the List and in a way it turned out so. Extensive search turned up blank unless I have an American library card, which I do not, or have access to a region 1 DVD player, which again, I do not have. I finally succeeded in finding part 2 of “Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie” on YouTube and that is what I had to settle with. Missing the first half of the movie, I feel unable to give a proper review of it and this will just be my impressions from the second half.

Klaus Barbie was known as “The Butcher of Lyon” for his actions during the second world war. What exactly he did is a bit unclear because it is covered by the first half of the movie, but as an SS officer with that nickname, it cannot have been good. As the war ended Barbie avoided prosecution for his crimes by being spirited away. This is where the second half starts in the middle of the story of how that was possible. Something about that it was an American intelligence agency who got him out using some underground network that involved the Catholic church in Italy. I apologize for being obscure here, but this part was very confusing to me.

Barbie worked in South America for various military regimes. To begin with to fight communists, but eventually to become a power factor in his own right, leading an organization that supplied the regimes with arms through sale of drugs. He was particularly active in Bolivia under the name Altman. In the seventies, his name started to surface, and a number of individuals began to chase him down. Only in 1983 he was finally caught and sent to France where he was, three years later, given a life sentence.

“Hotel Terminus...” is a project by French filmmaker Marcel Ophuls. He previously made the documentary movie “The Sorrow and the Pity” and “Hotel Terminus...” follows in the same path. Here his mission is not to find Klaus Barbie, but try to uncover what happened with him. Not just how he was found, but the entire environment around him. At least in the second half I watched, we see very little of him. A few pictures and short clips from the trial, but no interviews to speak of. Instead, Ophuls interviews the people around Barbie. Often in small snips and cross-clipped with another interview contradicting the first. There is no voice-over or explanatory text beyond the name and title of the interviewed (at least that!), so as a viewer I must infer the connection and context from the dialogue. I have a feeling that even with the first part, this would still have left me somewhat confused.

Some of the characters being interviewed are downright dodgy. They agreed to give interviews for a fee, but their answers are at best useless. Others look very qualified, such as the head of the German Chamber of Commerce to Peru, but held up against other interviews, they appear to by lying through their noses. What is truth and what is fiction? It gives the impression of a conspiracy working just outside our perception with threads not just to juntas in South America but across the globe.

The final part about the trial itself focuses particularly on two subjects: the dodgy defence lawyer who not only has an ambiguous relationship with reality but also appears to be connected to some very unsavoury organizations with a common goal to disrupt the western world (making this quite relevant today), and secondly how much of the testimony against Barbie was rejected, either because of the long time elapsed since the war or because essential witnesses were discredited. For a while I thought this would lead up to that Barbie went free, but alas, he did get a life sentence.

I would like to watch the first half if it ever became available to me. Not because I am eager to watch the crimes of Klaus Barbie, but because I feel I lack the context for the second half and the means to fully understand it. For the same reason I do not want to offer a recommendation for this. I simply cannot judge it fairly.

Cinema Paradiso (Nuevo Cinema Paradiso) (1988)

 

Mine aftener i paradis

I remember when “Cinema Paradiso” (“Nuovo Cinema Paradiso”) came out. On Danish TV, the movie reviewer (Ole Michelsen) was gushing over the movie, but I did not much care for it, being in the wrong age bracket at the time (15 years of age). 10-15 years later I finally watched it and was surprised to learn that I liked it. That is already a long time ago now and I never went back to it until now. Revisiting “Cinema Paradiso felt like coming back to an old friend. Everything looks the same but completely different at the same. Pretty much the topic of the movie.

In present day Italy, an old woman (Pupella Maggio) is trying to reach her son, Salvatore (Jacques Perrin). Salvatore lives in Rome, is a famous movie director and has not been home for thirty years. The mother finally gets through to his girlfriend who in turn tells Salvatore that a man called Alfredo has died. This makes Salvatore reminiscence about old days, which then becomes the bulk of the movie.

We are now back in a small Sicilian town, Giancaldo, shorty after the Second World War. Salvatore, now known as Toto (Salvatore Cascio), is a naughty little boy (8 years?) who works as an altar boy and spends most of the time in the projector room at the church, turned cinema at night, with the projectionist Alfredo (Philippe Noiret). His life at home is miserable with a lonely mother (Antonella Attili) whose husband never returned from the war, but with Alfredo, Toto experiences magic. The priest requires Alfredo to cut away all the naughty parts and Toto revels in these cutaways.

There is a fire in the projection room and Alfredo, although saved by Toto, loses his sight. When a local lottery winner opens a new cinema, Nuovo Cinema Paradiso, Toto, as the only skilled projectionist available, is hired with blind Alfredo to guide him.

Fast forward to the mid-fifties, Toto has become a young man (Marco Leonardi) in high school who still runs the projector. When a new girl, Elena (Agnese Nano) arrive in town, Toto falls in love. Unfortunately, her wealthy family does not approve so when Toto returns after military service and years out of contact with Elena, he leaves for Rome with Alfredo telling him never to come back.

Now, 30 years later, having remembered all this, Salvatore returns to Giancaldo for Alfredo’s funeral. The town both look the same and very different. His life as it was now only lives on in his memory.

This is a movie that relies heavily on nostalgia. It is a remembrance of times past in the Proustian form where the reality we are presented is not necessarily an objective reality but a remembered reality. The things that made an impression, of joy and passion, misery and misfortune and people looking and acting precisely as you want them to be remembered. Salvatore sees all his old friends when he returns, but they are like strangers to him because 30 years of nostalgia removes them from objective reality and, truthfully, who stays the same after 30 years?

While the life remembered is uniquely Salvatore’s, we all share that experience of remembering the past and so we can all relate to the process if not the actual content. We remember what made an impression on us in our childhood, and we remember our father and mother figures or our first love. True, Salvatore’s memories may be a tad more exotic and interesting than the rest of us, a film of my memories would be both sad and boring to anybody else, but they are also made more interesting by the patina of nostalgia, of the longing for a paradise lost. The name of the cinema is not coincidental and the Danish title given to the movie, literally “My evenings in paradise”, is a reference to the personal paradise lost of Salvatore.

It is an incredible movie to watch, especially because it succeeds in dragging you in. Time flies by and by the time it ended I was surprised to see how late it was. Finishing the movie is like waking from a dream that took you somewhere else. I often have a problem with Italians and their very... expressionist... way of acting, but I got past this super fast. Even young Toto’s shrill cry of “Alfredo Alfredo” becomes less annoying after a while and with Ennio Morricone’s awesome and dreamlike scoring, the dream is now our dream.

If there is any complaint it is that Salvatore never returned to his family for 30 years. That kind of makes him a dick.

“Cinema Paradiso” won a ton of prices, not least the Grand Jury prize in Cannes and the Best Foreign Language award at the Academy Awards. That the Academy did not deign to nominate it for anything else, does not speak to the credit of the Academy.

“Cinema Paradiso” remains a great movie and it has aged incredibly well. It is possibly even better today than I remember it, and I can only give it my highest recommendations.

 

Ved Vejen (1988)

 

Off-List: Ved vejen

It has been quiet here on my blog in July, but now I am back from my summer vacation and the first movie is a Danish off-List movie called “Ved Vejen”. I believe the English title is “Katinka”.

“Ved Vejen” is based on a story by Herman Bang and is, as far as I can tell, the only movie ever directed by the great Max von Sydow. It takes place in a small provincial community in Denmark around the turn of the century (that is, around 1900) and is particularly concerned with a woman called Katinka (Tammi Øst). In the opening scenes, Katinka is lying on her deathbed and is soon after getting her funeral, so we know that whatever is going to happen, will end poorly for Katinka.

Katinka is a quiet and thoughtful woman who is married to the stationmaster, Mr. Bai (Ole Ernst), at the little train station. Bai is a loud and big man, very jovial but also a bit insensitive. A new manager, Mr. Huus (Kurt Ravn) arrives to run one of the big farms in the area, and he causes some disturbance in the little community. The women see him as a very handsome man and surprisingly he is unengaged. As he seems uninterested in the eligible girls, he is written off as a bit odd, though very capable. Secretly though, he is falling in love with Katinka and she in him. Both are intensive but quiet types, and both know that this love is impossible for the simple fact that Katinka is married. They are so discreet even that it takes them most of the movie to realize that their feelings are shared. Both Bai and his wife have taken Huus into their home and Bai sees Huus as his friend, completely (and blissfully) unaware of the unspoken love between his wife and his friend. Huus is in obvious pain every time Bai makes a show of his love for his wife, but has enough politeness to be quiet. This dance takes up about an hour of the movie, until near the end, the walls are falling and Huus and Katinka admit their love for each other with the clear admission that this means they must part. Hence Katinka’s wasting and death.

This is the basic story. Everything else is framing. There are many characters introduced and many small side plots, but they all served to frame this basic triangle of impossible love.

It is a very classic plot, timeless even, and their situation would be difficult in any age. By placing the story in the time and environment used here, it is not just difficult, it is virtually impossible. In this time and place, divorce is unheard of and the reason that applies here, love to another man, is considered adultery. That it is the woman in the marriage who loves another man, just makes it so much more socially unacceptable. In this way, “Ved vejen” is related to such Victorian movies as “Room with a View” where social constraints build solid walls around people. Yet even without the social mores, Huus and Katinka’s relationship is doomed. Both are too conscious of the damage they would do. Bai may appear like an insensitive bully, but he sincerely loves his wife, and she does care for him a lot. He does not deserve to be dumped even if he is not worthy of her. I actually like Bai, I could see him as a friend and in those scenes on Katinka’s death bed, we see him completely reduced and broken to lose his wife.

I went into this movie not knowing what sort of movie I would be watching. The Danish output in 1988 was not impressive and this was one I had never watched before. The topic, though, is one I have a very hard time dealing with, so I spent a large part of the movie focussing on everything else in the movie. This was quite rewarding. They went all in to create a believable set for the movie. Often these period pieces look like a dress-up party, but here every detail was strictly period, from simple things like the lamps and trains to intricate things like the dialogue and the sentiments of the characters. This felt like going 130 years back in time. We see the holidays, the town fair, the parties and the daily work and there are so many details. It also helps that there are all these small side stories to latch onto. Most of them has to do with the importance to find somebody to marry, as if going around unmarried is a half death sentence, which of cause underlines the importance of the institution in this environment, but there are also some levity among the stories that helps this from being a complete misery feast.

This does not change that this is a movie to make you feel miserable, unless of course you enjoy impossible love stories. I know a large portion of the human population do love exactly that, but I am not among those and for that reason, I doubt this is a movie I am going to watch again.

So, how did Max von Sydow perform as a director? The direction is flawless. I can only regret he did not direct more movies.

     

Akira (1988)

 

Akira

Ever since my son learned “Akira” is on the List, he has impatiently been asking me when it is coming up. He has watched it several times and tells me this is one of the best and most important anime out there. Finally watching it with me was a big thing.

The story takes place in 2019, 31 years after a disaster destroyed much of Tokyo. Life in Neo-Tokyo is on the brink of chaos with a tenuous balance between a rumbling populace and an increasingly fascistic government. It is a nihilistic world where youth gangs are rampaging and the future looks bleak. Taneka belongs to such a biker gang, driving an awesome, red monstrosity of a bike. When his friend and fellow gang member Tetsuo gets involved in an accident, something strange happens.

Tetsuo is taken away by the military, and we learn they hold a number of oddly gifted children in a research facility. They possess a curious telepathic power and are part of a defence against a mystic entity called Akira, who, we learn, was the cause of the 1988 disaster. Tetsuo, it turns out, also have these powers, except he cannot control them at all.

Kaneda joins a rebellious group, mostly because of a girl, who wants to penetrate the military research facility to challenge the government, but it develops into a struggle to contain Tetsuo before he as well will destroy the city.

It is a wild story like all manga and anime and, frankly, I had some problems following it. In fairness though, I have trouble following most of the anime my son is showing me and this is not the worst. What they all have in common is the intensity. All emotions are 100%, dialogue is either screaming or sinister serious, there is no middle ground. The stakes are as high as possible, the end of the world or unbearable personal humiliation. “Akira” is all of that and for two hours straight, this is an exhausting affair.

Fortunately, there is also something glorious in all this extreme. It is dark and big, machines and technology are massive, explosions are world shattering and everything happens so fast, although there is always time for the characters to cry their heart out or predict the end of the world. This makes it a visual rollercoaster ride through some extraordinary animations and details in drawing. My son dabbles in drawing himself and he tells me that the level of detail in the scenes in “Akira” is among the best ever. It is truly detailed and what impresses me the most is the amount of world building that has gone into this. Sure, it is largely based on Japanese culture, but there is an extrapolation here that resembles “Bladerunner” and with a strong internal logic.

Two years ago, my family spent our summer vacation in Japan and experienced first hand how big manga and anime is there. This is not just a marginal entertainment genre, but something that seems to penetrate everything. I do not remember if we saw anything particularly referring to “Akira”, but given this movie’s celebrated status, it is difficult not to think it had a major influence on how this scene has developed since.

Although there is a conception that anime is mainly for children, “Akira” is not an easy movie to watch. The themes are adult or at least adolescent and the complexity of what is happening on the screen requires both attention and some maturity from the audience. But then again, my old brain may have atrophied, and a younger head is needed. I had to get the ending explained by my son. In the riot of colours and sound I lost track of what happened there in the conclusion.

“Akira” is an impressive movie, but probably not an obvious starter movie in the anime genre. It is adrenaline and high octane, but also surprisingly complex. And, as I am told, an early high point in the genre. That makes it a recommendation.

There are two more anime coming up for 1988.

 

The Thin Blue Line (1988)

 

The Thin Blue Line

Watching “The Thin Blue line” I get the impression that this is a milestone in true crime as a television or cinematic genre. I tried to look up what true crime was before this and the results were a bit vague, but the true crime shows on television since then look pretty much like “The Thin Blue Line”.

Documentarist Errol Morris stumbled on the story of Randall Adams while investigating a different story. Randall Adams was on a life sentence for killing a policeman in Texas, only something was not adding up, and his case is presented here through interviews and reenactments.

The outline of the story is that a car was pulled over one evening in 1976 by the police and as one of the officers went up to the car, he was shot point blank. Earlier that day Adams, who was passing through town had run out of fuel and was picked up by a guy called David Harris. They spend the day together and it was this car that was pulled over and Adams was arrested for the murder.

What Morris finds out is two things. That Harris, a hardened criminal, albeit only 16 years old, had bragged to his friends about killing the policeman and that the authorities seemed very keen on pinning this on an outsider rather than a local boy. There are interviews with both Adams and Harris, both of which makes it quite clear that Harris was the actual murderer and not Adams. The interviews with the police and the prosecutors gave the impression that they were dead certain while the defending side had been stonewalled and largely ignored. It was even mentioned that Adams was a better suspect because he was old enough to be eligible for death penalty.

We do not get far in “The Thin Blue Line” before we see this picture. It is not as if Morris has some twists for us. Instead, the picture just gets clearer and clearer. Yet, all the reenactments keep using Adams as the villain to the end, likely to demonstrate how unwilling the prosecution was to let go of this idea.

Morris has been criticised for being unreliable and biased and that there are also inconsistencies on the defendant’s side that are not explained here, yet it is hard to argue with the last scene, a tape recording of David Harris admitting to the murder, which, of course, makes Adams wrongly accused.

I had some trouble following the story. My copy had no subtitles, and the Texan drawl was very heavy on some of the characters, forcing me to guess at what they were talking about. Secondly, Morris never present the names and titles of his interviewees. I had to infer that from the connection. Some I can guess, simply because we got back to them so many times, but there are also those I still do not know who was in the story. That may be a point from Morris side, but not very helpful.

There are not that many documentaries on the List, and I sometimes wonder if those that are included, are there because they function as a movie feature in an artistic sense rather than just for information. If that is the reason “The Thin Blue Line” is included due to the style used to present the story. Is this the birth of the modern true crime show? Or is it a case of Morris messing with our heads and that is the artistic value? I like to think and indeed I hope it is the former and that Adams was released because of this. Morris drives a strong case, and I would hate to learn that it was all bull.

The unveiling of injustice is an interesting subject matter and as such this is an interesting view. As true crime though, all it takes is to open Netflix. We are swamped by those shows and I am frankly a bit tired of them.

    

Married to the Mob (1988)

 

My Wife Wants Me to See This: Married to the Mob

The third movie my wife got to chose for 1988 is the romantic comedy “Married to the Mob”. This is one of her favourite movies, so I have promised to give it a nice review.

Again, this is a movie with a strong, female lead. Angela de Marco (Michelle Pfeiffer) is the cliché wife of an Italian-American mob henchman, Frankie "The Cucumber" de Marco (Alec Baldwin). Like all the wives in her circle, she lives an idle life of housewife’ing, looking pretty, and all the creature comfort illegal money can get. Except, Angela is sick of it, all of it. Angela wants out. When Frankie is shot for frequenting the same whore as his boss, Tony "The Tiger" Russo (Dean Stockwell), Angela sees an opportunity. She gives everything away and leaves for New York with her son. This move is also strongly motivated by the amorous, but unwanted, interest of Tony.

Angela has also attracted the attention of the FBI. She was the wife of the murdered Frankie and she was seen kissing (or being kissed by) Tony. Clearly, she must have something to do with it. The lead investigator is the competent, but slightly juvenile, agent Mike Downey (Matthew Modine).

The new shithole apartment in New York is now getting crowded with unwanted guests from both the mob and the FBI, while Angela is simply trying to move on with her new life as a hairdresser. Predictably, this leads to awkward and comical situation with Tony looking for Angela, Connie (Mercedes Ruehl) looking for Tony (the only person Tony is afraid of) and Mike taking close surveillance very literally. This gets even more complicated when Mike falls in love with Angela.

Of course, this cannot go on and when it blows up, it really blows.

This is a romantic comedy with stress on both words. The romance is a very key component, and that counts for the miserable one with Frankie, the unwanted one with Tony and the dreamy one with Mike. The same is true for the comedy. Practically everything plays for comedic effects. This is not just the New York apartment that serves as a Marx Brothers stateroom, but everything else too. The gangsters do kill people, but they are also over the top gangsters who enjoy songs to their praise, sport silly nicknames and over-do the whole Italian mob family thing. It works though. Yes, they are a bit silly, but it is also fun. The greatest character, though, is Connie. Connie constantly suspect that Tony is unfaithful (which he is) and she is a huntress on the prowl when she smells foul play. She becomes literally feral when she goes after Tony and woe that person that gets in her way. Watching the badass gangster boss being afraid of his wife is priceless.

By 1988 the Italian gangster film is a well-established trope. It is already a log time since “The Godfather” and mobsters are getting to be a bit of a joke. “Married to the Mob” takes all these tropes and clichés and makes fun of them and because we are so familiar with the tropes, they become so funny here.

It also changes the viewpoint to a female position. This allows for angles we otherwise never see. What do all these mob-spouses actually do? It also allows for a strong and interesting female lead, something all the movies in this category has in common (not surprisingly, my wife likes movie with strong female leads). It is great to have such movies and a movie like “Married to the mob is an example of the options that gives the movie maker. Michelle Pfeiffer grabs this opportunity and gets the best out of it.

Director Jonathan Demme went on to make other movies with strong female leads such as “Silence of the Lambs” (NOT a romantic comedy), but before “Married to the Mob” he directed the fantastic Talking Heads concert movie “Stop making Sense” (reviewed on this blog). He brought along David Byrne who made a great musical score for “Married to the Mob”.

It is very difficult not to like “Married to the Mob”. If you accept it as a romantic comedy, and it never claims to be anything else, it will not disappoint. Probably a good date movie too.

 

Ariel (1988)

 

Ariel

Finland is an amazing country. There is a certain seriousness and sincerity about Scandinavians in general, but even for us, the Finnish stand out with their deadpan attitude. Few has been able to present this deadpan delivery as well as Aki Kaurismäki and this is reason enough to love his movies.

Taisto Kasurinen (Turo Pajala) is a miner whose mine closes. Sitting in a café, he listens to the rant of a colleague who then goes to the bathroom to kill himself. Taisto leaves his ramshackle house in his big, old convertible and drives south to the city.

Taisto gets robbed of all his money, takes on day-to-day work at the docks and stays in the dorm of a hostel. Irmeli (Susanna Haavisto) works as a hotel maid, night watch, butcher and as a parking attendant and in this function she is giving a ticket to Taisto. Impressed with his car, she jumps in with him and soon they are in her apartment, swearing eternal fidelity to each other.

What follows next is a string of poor luck for Taisto. He cannot find a job, is kicked out from the hostel and he is arrested and convicted for assault on one of the bandits who mugged him early on. In prison he befriends the bleak long-term prisoner, Mikkonen ( Matti Pellonpää). Together and with the help of a file from Irmeli, they escape. To get fake passports they take a job to rob a bank. The passport gangsters double cross them and Mikkonen dies in the ensuing gunfight. Taisto, Irmeli and her son flees on the ship “Ariel” to Mexico.

This summary sounds staccato because it is. One action takes the next in short scenes. Hardly a word is uttered, things just happen in rapid order. This makes it possible to pack all this into a 72-minute running time.

The subject matter is serious enough. This is the old tale of an innocent person who hits misfortune and through a series of coincidences finds himself in big trouble. This is social realist in the sense that it presents a certain hopelessness and vulnerability of the dispossessed and a hardness by the surrounding society. As such it is a social critique. But it is also a fairy tale. Things happen almost magically in the movie. Irmeli showing up out of the blue. Mikkonen as a helping agent who helps him escape and get passports. The misfortunes that practically fall out of the sky.

What makes the movie special, however, is the deadpan delivery. This is on every level. The way the scenes follow each other, what happens to the characters of the movie and not least their reactions and dialogue. Never do we see a hint of emotion in the dialogue, whether for love or anger. Everything is said in a clipped, businesslike manner. This deadpan is taken so far it becomes hilarious and what should be a serious movie becomes a comedy of sorts.

I have Aki Kaurismäki strongly suspected for deliberately making fun of this idiosyncratic Finnish deadpan style. Any doubt should be wafted away when considering some of his other movies. His Leningrad Cowboys project uses deadpan humor very deliberately and it is not alone. I totally dig this humor. It is certainly not for everybody, and I can easily imagine this going over the head of many people, but to me it is a riot. I was howling from laughter during the flirting scene in the car and the prison escape was pure slapstick. Even a small thing like Taisto finding a bigger picture to compete with his neighbor’s in the hostel is so subtle and elegant deadpan humor that I am still smiling.

“Ariel” is not a big movie and technically it is not very advanced, but if you like Finnish deadpan delivery as much as I do, this is a gem.

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.