Amadeus (1984)

 

Amadeus

The first movie of 1984 is “Amadeus”. It was also the big winner of 1984 with eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor, so 1984 starts on a high.

In 1823, Antonia Salieri (F. Murray Abraham) is a patient in a hospital. He is visited by a priest to whom he tells the tale of how he killed Mozart. Yes, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the great composer. His story takes us back to Vienna in the 1770’ies.

At this time Salieri is a court composer at the court of Emperor Joseph II (Jeffrey Jones), a sovereign very much interested in music but lacking any talent for it. At this time Mozart (Tom Hulce) arrives in Vienna. He already has a reputation as a prodigy, but he is also an infantile playboy. In an age of wigs, face powder and effeminate men, it takes something to stand out as an obscene playboy.

Salieri immediately recognizes the massive talent of Mozart and is perceptive enough to realize he is himself just an amateur by comparison. Add to this the ease with which Mozart produces his art and the libertine silliness of the man, Salieri is struck by deep envy and anger with God for bestowing such gifts on an undeserving person. Salieri makes it his life mission to bring Mozart down.

Mozart and Salieri are real, historic characters, but the story presented here is entirely fiction. Mozart died young from a mysterious ailment and already in the early nineteenth century, the conspiracy theory were flourishing that Salieri and Mozart were rivals and that it was Salieri who killed Mozart. In reality they were more like colleagues, and it was Mozart who had a thing for conspiracies.

So, if this movie is not about a historic event, what is it then? My understanding is that this is a tale of envy. Of mediocracy and conformity trying to stifle the extraordinary and the beautiful. What better example of talent than the greatest composer ever and the myth of Salieri’s rivalry with him. Director Milos Forman was Czech and had a history of subversive movies challenging the communist regimes in Eastern Europe and it is not a big jump to see Salieri as the communist party supressing the arts in the East.

As a drama, “Amadeus” works, but at a very slow pace. Considering Salieri “just” has to bring Mozart down, he is awfully slow at it, this is a lengthy movie, and it is more about the grief Salieri suffers at his more or less failed attempts at discrediting and marginalizing Mozart. Mozart suffers immensely, but he does not make it easy for himself either. He is a reckless playboy, convinced of his magnificence and spending far too much for his measly income.

The real assets of “Amadeus” are the music and the sets. Oh, Lord! Almost every time there is music, it is Mozart. The volume goes up, it is full orchestra, and it is a Mozart Greatest Hits show. We hear parts of “The Marriage of Figaro”, “Don Giovani”, “The Magic Flute” and many of his famous symphonies. I am not very knowledgeable on classical music, but even a heathen like me gets blown away by this music and the arrangement of it does it full honour. This is a movie to listen to in a cinema with a good sound system.

The set is just as magnificent. The illusion of the eighteenth century is perfect, not just on the costumes and the wigs, but using Prague as location was a strike of genius. Some of the scenes were shot in the very theatre where Don Giovanni premiered originally. It has been far too long since my last visit to Prague, but I do remember that eighteenth century vibe. I also did bring home a Don Giovanni puppet on my last visit...

What works less well is the choice of using American English as the spoken language. I know this is not an unusual thing and even Ridley Scott’s recent “Napoleon” did it, but I kept expecting to hear German. This gets really bad with Mozart’s wife Constanze Mozart (Elizabeth Berridge), who otherwise delivers an excellent performance, but her accent is so thick... According to Wikipedia, Mark Hamill was considered as Mozart. That could have been fun.

This is not a bad movie at all, even if it seems to creep along at a slow pace. There is so much to look at and listen to that I do not mind. My only regret is that I never saw it in a cinema.

 

  

1984

 

1984

At this point, I am about to start on 1984. Normally, I make no introduction to a new year, but 1984 is different. To my mind 1984 is one of the great movie years. I am, of course hopelessly biased as I grew up with these movies, but even with that in mind, the List is exceptionally stingy for this year. When I look down on lists of what was released in 1984, I am amazed the editors found room for so few movies.

Of course, the list of movies I like is a product of my personal taste and looking down the release list, many of them do not qualify as great, but they mean something to me and where I would normally add three off-List moves to review, here I feel I could add ten movies and not be done with it.

I already picked my three movies to add, but do not be surprised if a few more sneak themselves onto my block. For now, I will make a quick run-down on movies that did not make the cut for the List, but which I think deserve at least a mentioning.

In addition, there are a similarly long list of movies I am not familiar with but that I very much would like to watch. Most of those have slightly more adult zing than those on the list below.

 

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

Seriously? Even if this is the poorest of the three great Indiana Jones movies, it is a no-brainer. I picked this as off-List without blinking.

Karate Kid

Maybe not film art but a pop-culture landmark. Who does not know “wax-on, wax-off” and Mr. Miyagi? Also, “Cobra Kai” is one of the best current series on Netflix. This I also picked as off-List for 1984.

Gremlins

Why is this movie not on the list? This is better and more important than at least half the movies on the List. The only explanation is that the editors do not like comedies and blockbusters. This is both. Of course, I added this one.

Romancing the Stone

While this is “Indiana Jones light”, it is also immensely entertaining and one of those movies I have watched so many times.

Police Academy

Yeah, I know, not film art, but this, the first instalment was immensely funny when it came out. I have rewatched it a few times since and while it has not aged too well, I still have a good time watching this.

The NeverEnding Story

This was a monster hit in 1984, at least in Denmark. Everybody was singing the Limahl theme song, and I even went on to read the book. Personally, I found both book and film a bit disappointing, but I was in the minority at the time.

Footloose

Well, Kevin Bacon dancing...

Revenge of the Nerds

Again, not exactly high brow, but every time I think of the Nerds movies, I fell like revisiting them. This one is the mother of the Nerds movies, and the jokes are not as stupid as they later became.

Splash

A guilty pleasure. Not a great movie, but with Daryl Hannah and Tom Hanks. That alone makes it worth watching.

Red Dawn

Decidedly a B-movie, but the list of young actors that would later become big names is amazing.

Starman

With Jeff Bridges as the alien, this is a decent romantic sci-fi.

The Last Starfighter

I only watched this one in recent years and have not the sweet memories of childhood. Still not a bad sci-fi.

Blood Simple

The first feature from the Coen brothers. Say no more.

Purple Rain

Prince!!!

All of Me

Steve Martin is not my favourite comedian, but this one is one of those I like the best.

Dune

David Lynch version of Dune took a lot of heat, but I quite like it. If anything, it is not Lynch enough.

Bachelor Party

One of Tom Hanks’ earliest movie. This movie it totally nuts.

Canonball Run II

Okay, not a good movie, but it was the very first movie I went to see without parents. I thought it was great. I was 11 years old, so that kind of figures.

 

The Ballad of Narayama (Narayama-Bushi Ko) (1983)

 

The Ballad of Narayama

When “The Ballad of Narayama” (“Narayama Bushiko”) came up, I invited my wife and son to join me watching a Japanese anime movie. I was however doubly misled. The cover was cartoonish and the movie I had found was the 1958 version of the story. When I finally found the 1983 version, it was not anime and most certainly not cozy family fare. “The Ballad of Narayama” is a very brutal movie and I am glad my son did not get to watch it.

We are in a small village in a mountainous region of Japan sometime in the nineteenth century. Life here is hard and always a hairbreadth away from disaster. Orin (Sumiko Sakamoto) is the matriarch of one of the families and we follow her through most of a year while she is trying to prepare for ubasute. In this village (and likely the region) the belief is that when people turn 70, they must journey to the top of a holy mountain and there be left to die. Orin seems to long for this to happen despite her good health, so much that she knocks out some of her teeth to convince her son that she needs to go to the mountain.

 Her preparations include finding a husband for one of her son and a woman for her other son to lose his virginity to. She must train her daughter in law all her household tricks, such as how to catch trout and she must ensure the family have enough food to survive the next year.

These preparations are secondary though to the general portrait of life in the village, and this is a portrait that does not pull any punches. Excess children are killed so not to feed them, we see a baby emerge in the stream as the snow melts. An entire family, children and pregnant woman included are culled by being buried alive on the pretext that they stole food, but really to make the harvest last a full year. Women can be sold and are therefore valuable and sex seems to be the only marginally pleasant pastime of these people, which is therefore eagerly practiced. It is a life very close to nature, at the mercy of nature, really, but a life that also strips people of their humanity.

In this light, the ubasute of Orin is not just a religious practice, but both a relief from the pains of life and a means to avoid being an unproductive burden on the village. These two items are of course combined as it is an embarrassment and a pain to know you are a useless extra mouth to feed. Some of the old people refuse to go to the mountain and it is clear that they live in shame and suffers the scorn of the rest of the village.

It is a hard and merciless movie. The brutality brings the points home very effectively, but it also makes it a very uncomfortable movie to watch. The culling of the family was extremely shocking, and I had to take a break from the movie at that point. Thankfully I was watching the movie alone. The production value is very high, and the convincing realism simply adds to the brutality.

It is only a month since I was in Japan for my summer vacation and part of it, I actually spent in the very mountains around Nagano where this was filmed. The thing that stroke me, especially out there in the mountains, was how few young people there were. Japan has become a country of old people with fewer and fewer people to support the older generation. I have no idea if ubasute in any form is still practiced, but I did get a very clear impression that the old generation does not want to be a burden, that they continue to work, practically till they drop. Plus eighty-year-olds driving taxi and carrying around your luggage. Very senior train station staff. Great-grandparent baristas in coffeeshops treating the customers as if their grandchildren are visiting. They are wonderful, these old people, but I sense the sadness of the brutal reality that makes it necessary that they must continue. On the other hand, it may well be the very fact that they are still working that makes them youthful enough to do it.

In this strange and somewhat twisted way, “The Ballad of Narayama” feels relevant today. With not enough resource, there is no room for unproductive mouths.

“The Ballad of Narayama” won the Palme D’Or in 1983 and I can see why. This is very much a Cannes movie. I know I should recommend it, but I do not feel like watching it again.

 

Local Hero (1983)

 

Local Hero

“Local Hero” was an addition to the List in the grand 10th edition revision. It is on the light side so I find it surprising that this would have been added, a discussion I may take up when I get to 1984, but it is also a comedy and as the list is scarce on those, I will take it and be happy.

An American company, “Knox Oil and Gas” wants to build an oil terminal on the north coast of Scotland. There is a little village on the site so “Mac” MacIntyre (Peter Riegert) is sent to Scotland to acquire the land and pay people to move out of the way.

The village of Ferness is a charming little place on a wild and picturesque beach, and already at this point I recognize the template of the outsider arriving at a local place to disturb the peace. According to this template, Mac will, although facing hostility in the beginning with some obligatory faux pas, eventually be converted to the local way of thinking and the crisis be averted. We see that happen here as well. Gordon Urquhart (Denis Lawson), who fills multiple roles as hotel manager, village lawyer and bartender at the pub is not exactly accommodating to Mac when he arrives. Mac and his British assistant Danny Oldson (Peter Capaldi) are met with some suspicion by the locals.

That is, until they find out why he is there. According to the template this should piss them off and that is also what Mac expects. Instead, they are over the moon with joy and happy as on Christmas Eve. The lives these people live are hard and frugal and with all the money Knox oil is going to pay them they are finally free to move away and live they lives they want to live. To the villagers, Mac is not disturbing the peace, but Santa coming with gifts of a lifetime.

While this works well for comedy, it would seem to take away the drama of the story. The only ones who are opposed to the project is the aptly named Marina (Jenny Seagrove), the marine biologist who were led to believe the project is a marine laboratory, and Ben Knox, an old man living in a shed on the beach who happen to own four miles of the coast. And, of course, Mac himself who, getting to know the local village, falls madly in love with life there, so different from the corporate city life he is used to.

The opposition of Ben Knox turns critical when the villagers turn on him for obstructing their windfall and it takes the interference of the equally eccentric Knox oil top dog, Felix Happer (Burt Lancaster), to secure a happy ending.

As I mentioned above, “Local Hero” is close to being a template comedy and the twist here is really all that keeps it from being one. Had it been the locals fighting the corporation this would have been unbearable sweet and romantic, but it adds some bitter spice that what we, the outsiders see as a romantic and original culture, sticks no deeper than their wish to get away from it with money in their pockets. It is nice for us to visit such places, but for those who live there it is not as romantic as all that. I have myself experienced that when working on wind farm projects on remote locations. When you come with a lot of money, the locals are only too happy to get those, and it is outsiders who see it as something lost. Not always, but often enough and who are we to say that is wrong, us with less stake in it?

No doubt the village and the place itself would suffer a great loss if the place would be turned into an oil terminal and Mac, with his outsider’s view, can see how special what these people have is. Where he starts as a high powered, cynical businessman, he becomes more and more reluctant and apathetic as he must proceed towards the inevitable.

It is a charming movie, and the success of this template can always be measured on how well we manage to get under the skin of the locals, both those in focus and those in the background. They never turn ridiculous and despite their very local manners, the movie remains sympathetic towards them, but it also does not become an outright postcard. It is a tight balance, and the balance is well maintained. The only place where the movie tip over is around Felix Happer. His eccentricity makes the portrayal of the locals look like a documentary.

The only part of the script I failed to follow was the role of Russian trawler, Victor (Christopher Rozycki). As a fellow visitor I appreciate the advice he gives Mac, but after that he hangs on and takes part in the negotiations although he has no stake in them. Maybe I missed something.

Mark Knopfler did the score of the movie and even with a rudimentary familiarity with Dire Straits, you will recognize the “Local Hero” theme as one of Dire Straits signature tunes. It works terrific for the movie.

“Local Hero” is easy and pleasant. It is awfully close to being template and light weight but has enough charm and twist and underlying food for thought to stand out and be worth watching. And the List does need more comedies.

 

Scarface (1983)

 

Scarface

“Scarface” from 1983 is supposed to be a remake of “Scarface: Shame of a Nation” from 1932. Frankly, I do not remember much of the original movie, so I went back to read the review I wrote 11 years ago. In the second paragraph I wrote that gangster movies all seem like copies of each other and that I am not very sympathetic to them in the first place. That is a position I still hold 11 years later. With back-to-back gangster movies, I am get tired of them as a genre and this one is definitely inferior to “Once upon a Time in America”.

The 1983 version of “Scarface” tells the story of the rise and fall of Tony Montana (Al Pacino), a Cuban small time crook evicted from Cuba to The States, where he soon makes contact with the local criminal world and starts to make a name for himself.

His first job is to kill a fellow Cuban refugee. Next, he and his Cuban friends has to buy some dope from another gangster. This almost goes horribly wrong as the sellers turn on them and cut up Montana’s friend with a chainsaw. The resulting bloodbath is spectacular.

Tony and his right-hand Manny (Steven Bauer) now begin to work for a local drug lord, Frank Lopez (Robert Loggia), whom Tony impresses, but then fall out with when he sets up a cocaine import deal with a Bolivian drug lord, Sosa (Paul Shenar), way bigger than Frank can handle. Tony wants everything Frank has, including his girlfriend, Elvira (Michelle Pfeiffer), and when Frank tries to get rid of him, Tony kills Frank and takes over all that was his.

We then jump 3 years ahead where Frank is a big drug lord himself. At this stage everything implodes on Tony, mainly due to his own poor choices and bad temper and the whole thing ends in a giant and very bloody shoot-out.

Tony Montana is a thoroughly unsympathetic character. At every turn he is brutal and egoistic and filled with a very macho anger and pride that may give street credit, but very few points in my book. His rise is sort of a “crime pays if you are brutal enough” fable. The American dream achieved through violence. I ended up hating the guy with a vengeance and his fall could not happen quick enough. There is supposed to be some sympathetic traits, such as his refusal to kill children and him out-smarting his opponents, but when you start at -100 points, these things all mean nothing. Maybe we are supposed to be impressed by him, but I was merely disgusted.

The world in Scarface is a bleak place. It is a place of cheap death, of dirty money and dirties cops. It is a rich people’s world where wealth means you are above the law and normal human standards. It is a world where machismo is cooler than anything. Tony Montana fits this world perfectly, so maybe the point of the movie is that a world that allow these values is a world that allow Tony Montana.

One thing I did not understand is how it could take this long for Tony Montana to implode. His character is incredibly destructive and often destroys the very things he is trying to do. He lashes out without thinking, which is rather stupid, really. These are traits he brings to the table from the beginning so to imagine he would make it to the top and continue for three years before his deroute, is just too incredible. I cannot follow the scriptwriters here. This would imply something happened at this point, but nothing is happening that did not already happen in the beginning.

“Scarface” is a famous movie. It is famous (or infamous) for its extreme level of violence, something me may shrug at today, but by 1983 standards, this is really out there. If is famous as the ultimate gangster movie and it is references in popular culture like no other gangster movie. This is supposed to be big stuff. I guess I am just not very sympathetic to gangster movies in the first place.

 

Once Upon a Time in America (1983)

 

Der var engang i Amerika

It has been quiet on this blog for some time, largely due to my summer vacation in Japan, but also because this entry clicks in at almost 4 hours. With all my other summer activities, this amounts to watching a full season of a tv-series. Things take time.

When I think of Sergio Leone, I invariably think of his westerns. Applying his particular format of super close-ups, composition pictures, long takes and epic scale on any other setting is difficult for me to wrap my head around. Yet why not? To do this on the American gangster movie though, seems like a stretch, until you realize that this is just another sort of western.

Sergio Leone’s swan song is about a Jewish gang in New York. Chronologically, it starts in the early twenties where a group of boys, Noodles (Robert De Niro, Scott Tiler), Patsy (James Hayden, Brian Bloom), Cockeye (William Forsythe, Adrian Curran) and Dominic (Noah Moazezi), do small jobs for the more established gangsters until Max (James Wood, Rusty Jacobs) shows up and their gangster activities become more serious. This is not where the movie starts, though. The opening is an orgy of violence where a series of people are shot or tormented ruthlessly, forcing an adult Noodles to escape to Buffalo and a new identity. This is a worthy Leone opening which is only marred by the incessant ringing of phone that started to get to me badly.

In 1968 Noodles returns to New York and as he walks down memory lane, we follow his “career” in flashbacks. These includes the shocking killing of Dominic, the rise of the gang with Max and Noodles forming a leadership team and Noodles infatuation with Deborah (Elizabeth McGovern, Jennifer Connelly), the sister of part time gang member Fat Moe (Larry Rapp, Mike Monetti). The killing of Dominic sends young Noodles into a frenzy where he kills the murderer and stabs a policeman, earning him several years in prison.

When Noodles is released in 1931 everybody has grown up and the gangster business is lucrative but tough. Max and Noodles disagree on the direction with Max wanting to take chances Noodles are not ready to take.

This is where the movie becomes complicated and where the 1968 thread ties in with the opening in 1933. I do not want to reveal too much of what happens here, but frankly, I am not myself too certain what happens. Suffice to say that Noodles have been living for 35 years thinking he killed his best friend while Max was actually alive and kicking and essentially stole everything that was Noodle’s.

This would not be Leone if the main characters were not a complex combination of good and evil or at least complex. The movie works as a portrait of Noodles, his aspirations and desires. Ruthless and violent on the one hand, but still with a sort of moral compass, especially when it comes to loyalty and the boundaries of what is acceptable. This gets really complicated when it gets to Deborah, a girl he loves and who cares for him, yet refuses to commit to him. There is an infamous rape scene where he has learned that she will leave him to go to Hollywood, “forcing” him to take what is not freely given. This is frankly one of the ugliest scenes in a movie full of ugly scenes and we are somehow supposed to understand why he does it. Yet, I suppose that even he can see that he went way too far and maybe this is what changed him for good.

I suspect that Leone wanted to extend this portrait of a man to a portrait of a nation growing up, that the story of this gang is somehow also the story of America as seen from Leone’s Italian chair. I am not certain how well this analogy works or how flattering it is.

There is no doubt that “Once Upon a Time in America” is a big movie. In every sense it is large and that includes the production value. Every scene is thought through and there are so many details everywhere. It also takes its time, for better or worse. On first release the original movie was cut down from four to two hours and the scenes ordered chronologically and the movie tanked. The version in general circulation today is almost the original length and has been celebrated as a masterpiece. I am not certain I would go this far, but it is a movie that needs to be watched slowly.  

My main objection to “Once Upon a Time in America” is that I am struggling to see the point, but that may be more my problem than the movie’s problem. Maybe I just need to think some more about it.

Koyaanisqatsi (1983)

 

Koyaanisqatsi

“Koyaanisqatsi” is a non-narrative film and should as such be considered as an art film. I knew that going in, so I skipped reading up on the movie before watching, in order to make my own experience with the movie. By leaving out a narrative, the sensation of watching the movie becomes the message and in a sense the narrative. It is a movie to be felt.

The imagery of the movie is either in time lapse or in slow motion with the speed of either varying. We start out with natural landscapes of deserts. Empty land devoid of anything. Then we switch to human made deserts. Sad, ruined land, empty housing areas, nuclear bomb explosions and superhighways. The impression here is that these human wastelands is as devoid of life as the natural wastelands.

Scenes now switch between pictures of human life and machinery, both in time lapse so it appears extra hectic and with stressing music. The scenes with people and the scenes with machinery look uncannily similar as if we are all cogs and wheels in a big machine. It is stressing to look at. Factory workers at high speed, thousands of cars criss-crossing city streets, people coming off an escalator very much like the sausages at the factory. Only when we then switch to the individual human do we switch to slow motion as if juxtapositioning the person with the machine that is our modern life.

The speed of the time lapse keeps increasing until at the climax everything is a blur. Even daily, harmless routines like eating and watching television looks hectic and inhuman. Then, finally we see the grid of the city and the grid of an electronic circuit board, and they look very much the same. We are all small electrons buzzing around in the big machine.

After this we see pictures of individual characters seemingly left outside, stepping away from the paths of everybody else and a rocket exploding in mid air along with a number of other scenes of destruction. The message I get is that we need to step off this race or it will end badly.

The execution of all this is of high quality, the pictures are sharp, the editing skilful and the music is haunting. It is a bit long for what it is trying to do, an hour and half was too much for a single sitting for me, but it is fascinating if rather stressful to look at.

It is also difficult not to be convinced by the movie. Our daily life at high speed is very much like a machine. Something about the time lapse takes away our humanity and when that is combined with the sheer number of people, it all looks like a frantic anthill. I used to go frequently to Beijing and Seoul and there I got that same feeling.

Does this mean that we all need to step off the hamster wheel and break with conformity? I do believe this is the message here, but maybe less can do it. Maybe this is a warning to not let go of our individuality and to find a balance between being a member of the big machine and being ourselves in our own little world.

The end credit tells us that “Koyaanisqatsi” means “life out of balance” (among a number of similar translations) in the Hopi language, so I suppose we need to find that balance and avoid getting eaten up by the machine. Maybe watch “Mordern Times” again...

“Koyaanisqatsi” is an interesting art film. In comparison with “Sans Soleil” which I reviewed a few weeks ago, it is a lot easier to interpret, though the individual picture were far more interesting in that other movie. Or maybe it is just because I am going to Japan in a few days. Still, I do recommend it as one of the better non-narrative movies I have watched.