She's Gotta Have It (1986)

 

She's Gotta Have It

Everybody starts somewhere and for Spike Lee, it was with “She’s Gotta Have It”. Or, at least this was his first feature length movie. As most such debuts, it is a low-cost affair, but one with a lot of qualities. It is also a sort of comedy, something I did not see coming.

The movie is aimed at explaining a woman called Nola Darling (Tracy Camilla Johns) and alternates between interviews with the characters and the actual story. In this manner it foretells the much later style of reality TV. The special thing about Nora Darling is her sex life. Rather than the usual serial monogamy, Nora practices parallel polygamy. At any time, Nora has several partners openly, mainly for the sex.

Suitor 1 is the gentle and polite Jamie (Tommy Redmond Hicks) who adores Nora and is ready to commit himself fully to her.

Suitor 2 is the street-smart but gangly Mars (Spike Lee himself), who is fun, or tries to be, but also rather needy.

Suitor 3 is the wealthy male model Greer (John Canada Terrell) who may have the looks and money, but is very much impressed with himself and rather intolerable.

Nora is enjoying being with all three of the men, but the men find it very hard to accept to share her with the others. Half their talk with Nora is trying to impress her, in their specific style, and the other half is complaining about her other men. From the general portrait of Nora, we learn that she has difficulty committing herself to anything but prefer to float around between things and just take what is coming. Pretty much like her relation to men.

Of course this must come to a head at some point, and the conclusion may be considered surprising except that it drives the point of the movie.

 It was a surprise to me that this was a comedy. The Spike Lee movies I know tend to lean on the heavy side, but this one is a lively affair with some pretty outré characters and situations. The narcissistic Greer is a hoot. Every time he opened his mouth I was giggling. Lee himself as Sam is also a comical character though on a slightly more subtle level and in both cases, it is amusing to see how Nora uses them. They appear super cool but are really dupes.

With Jamie it is different. His character does not play for comedy, but represents something else. He is the good guy, but understood in terms as the conventionally good guy. He is the person with the right opinions, saying and doing the right things, but those conventional values is everything Nola is not, and this is where the movie gets interesting. Who is it that says that Nola’s way of life is wrong? It is unconventional, but is conventional right? The normal story we get is that men are allowed to stray outside conventions, but here it is a woman and she is strong enough to stick to it. What we are challenged with is if conventions are really right. Should Nola conform or should the world accept Nola? And if something is okay for, why not for women?

The style of “She’s Gotta Have It” is gritty in its black and white cinematography and the documentary tone goes a long way to cover up and make believable the less than stellar acting performances. This feels like a movie made by friends on a shoestring budget, but in a wrapping that makes this acceptable, even preferable and supports the veracity. This looks like reality TV long before that was a thing.

Spike Lee has been called the Woody Allen of Afro-American cinema, and I can definitely see that. Everything from soundscape to cinematography and script screams New York, and this is a New York not that different from that of Woody Allen.

A very strong debut of Spike Lee. I look forward to watching his other movies on the List.

  

Short Circuit (1986)

 

Off-List: Short Circuit

The second off-List movie for 1986 is “Short Circuit”. I am of the general opinion that there are far too few comedies on the List, and I have a soft spot for these eighties comedies even if they do not necessarily qualify as great. “Short Circuit” was a big movie for me in my childhood, and I think it holds up better today than most comedies.

At the commercial research facility Nova five autonomous military drones are presented to the military. As this is the eighties, the drones are semi-humanoid with tracked drives and a face like a Mars rover. They are also mounted with a high-powered laser of Star Wars strength. The military is impressed with their capabilities but in the aftermath one of the drones are hit by lightning which resets its memory and does... something else. Like Frankenstein, the lightning seems to have imbued the drone with life. The drone, Number 5, goes AWOL and through accidents finds itself lost in a food truck.

The owner of the food truck, Stephanie (Ally Sheedy), first take the drone for being an extraterrestrial alien, but by the time she realizes it is a military robot, Number 5 has convinced her he is something more.

Meanwhile, the Nova facility is in an uproar. The top manager, Howard Marner (Austin Pendleton) is keen to get his expensive hardware back. His head of security, Captain Scroeder (G. W. Bailey), is eager to blow up the drone with excessive force if necessary. Engineers Newton Crosby (Steve Guttenberg) and Ben Jabituya (Fisher Stevens) want to secure the drone unharmed as their precious creation.

And so, the hunt begins. Who will get the drone or will Number 5’s newfound intelligence and newfound allies save it?

What makes “Short Circuit” such a charming movie is the character of Number 5. He is naive as a child, smart as a genius, but also lovable as a human being is supposed to be. This, being a “good person”, more than anything makes it the heart of the movie and then it does not hurt that it is funny to boot with a pile of great one-liners it clearly learnt from trashy TV shows and has very expressive “eyebrows”. Movies, especially Hollywood, has classified the “Alien” as either a scary and powerful danger (“The Terminator”) or the lovable creature teaching humans on what it means to be human (“E.T.”). Number 5 is clearly in the second category although it is created as belonging to the first. The transition is attributed to it “becoming alive”, but is really by equipping it with humanity.

From a comedy point of view, it was a scoop to make G. W. Bailey be Captain Scroeder. He is essentially the same character he played in “Police Academy” and that makes him a fantastic butt of the jokes and pranks pulled on him. It is tempting to see Steve Guttenberg in the same light, but rather than being a street-smart romantic, he is being the isolated, shy engineer. It is difficult for Guttenberg to be entirely convincing in this role, but he gives it a shot. His scenes are, however, usually stolen by Fisher Stevens who, in Indian brownface, mess up the English language every time he opens his mouth. I know it is hopelessly politically incorrect and I should be cringing badly, but it is hilariously funny.

“Short Circuit” is fantastic family entertainment. That category of films has since then suffered badly and the label today is more a warning to stay away than anything else, but forty years ago it was possible to make good family movies. As a thirteen-year-old boy I loved the movie and loved the charming robot and today, 39 years later, I still love this movie. I find different things fun and charming, but it is the same magic. In an age of drone warfare and AIs and autonomous driving this is a surprisingly relevant movie and it is great with a positive spin for a change on those topics.

Take your children to watch this movie. You will all get something out of it and likely have a good time.

 

Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)

 

Hannah og hendes søstre

Before this project, if asked what a Woody Allen movie is like, I would have described it as something akin to “Hannah and Her Sisters” despite never having watched it before. And precisely for this reason I would not voluntarily have sat down to watch one. Today, my opinion on his movies is more nuanced with some of them actually being among my favourites, but I am afraid “Hannah and Her Sisters” will not make it to that status.

The setup is a group of people in New York (of course) centred around three sisters, Hannah (Mia Farrow), Lee (Barbara Hershey) and Holly (Dianne Wiest). There are three main story arches and the movie switches between the three of them and let them meet at various points.

In one of these lines Elliot (Michael Caine), Hannah’s husbond, is trying and succeeding in having an affair with Lee. Elliot is basically a horny middle-aged man and when he realizes what he has done he is caught in a pickle of remorse and indecision but at least it made Lee leave the intolerable Frederick (Max von Sydow), a man incredibly impressed with himself.

Holly is a washed-up ex-drug addict. She is trying to become an actress (of course) and fails. Her attempt at catering goes south when her partner, April (Carrie Fisher) takes both her prospective boyfriend and acting assignment. Only when she turns to writing, it seems to work for her, except those around her clearly blame her for witing about them.

Finally, Hannah’s ex-husband, Mickey (Woody Allen) is going through a crisis when he thinks he has a brain tumour. Mickey is Allen classic so he is super neurotic, super self-centred and talking like a waterfall. When he learns there was no tumour, he quits his job at a television show and starts to look for the meaning of life.

The key word all round is that all these characters are insufferable. Everything is about themselves, their personal needs, their personal animosities and their need to be recognized. Some of them are weak, like Holly, some are strong like Frederick, and some are even somewhat amusing like Mickey, but they are all clowns, and their lives seem to balance on the edge of self-inflicted disaster.

For me, this makes it very difficult to relate and sympathize with any of them and I know it is me misunderstanding the purpose of the movie. This all plays out for comedy, and we are supposed to laugh at all these people making a mess of their (and each other’s) lives, but I usually have a problem with that sort of comedy and instead look at the characters with a mixture of dislike and pity. Underneath this attempt at comedy, I sense the tragedy of self indulgence.

What does work here is the scenery and the soundscape. Both are, again, Allen classic. This is more New York than “Sex and the City” and the soundtrack has that jazzy thirties vibe Allen is so well known for. We all know he is in love with the thirties, and this is just another proof.

It is also an impressive cast we get here, a cast that, except for Allen himself, is acting against type. Caine is literally pathetic, von Sydow is arrogant beyond belief and Maureen O'Sullivan, as the mother of the sisters, is a loud alcoholic. They do it all very well as do the girls. I just do not like their characters.

“Hannah and Her Sisters” went on to win three Academy Awards (Michael Caine and Dianne Wiest for supporting roles and Allen for Best Original Screenplay) and was nominated in another four categories including Best Picture, so clearly somebody liked it better than me.

To me, the highlight was Woody Allen trying to join the Hare Krishna. That is actually a funny thought.

 

Blue Velvet (1986)

 

Blue Velvet

It has been quiet here on my blog for the past few weeks. We have been moving into a new apartment, so movie watching has been taking backseat while we are getting ourselves installed. To top that off, we spent last week in Prague and visited, among many other things, a David Lynch exhibition. It is therefore very fitting that the next movie on the List is his “Blue Velvet”.

I like watching David Lynch’ movies. There is almost always an underlying mystery and while I know I will never fully understand it, this mystery provides a depth that goes far beyond the apparent story. In this respect “Blue Velvet” is middle of the range. It is more complex than “The Elephant man” and “Dune”, but not as obscure as “Eraserhead” and “Mulholland Drive”. It is sort of on par with “Twin Peaks” and that is not the only similarity with Lynch’ famous TV-series.

Young man Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) has returned to his hometown because his father had an accident. Left with little to do, he is sent off on an adventure when he finds an ear near his home. The police detective (George Dickerson) is a friend of his father, and this leads Jeffery to Detective Williams’ daughter, Sandy (Laura Dern). Jeffrey is fascinated with the mystery and when he learns that this may be related to nightclub singer Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini), he finds a way to enter her home.

Soon, Jeffrey is in way over his head. Dorothy is at the mercy of a brutal and rather unhinged man called Frank (Dennis Hopper) who seems to have kidnapped her son to keep her submissive. Jeffrey is getting close to Sandy, but also attracted to Dorothy whom he wants to help and in the middle of this is Frank. It is a rabbit hole, and the deeper Jeffrey gets into this hole the stranger and more disturbing it all get.

As a criminal mystery this is a slow burn with a plotline that appears fairly straight forward, but things are happening that are anything but straight forward. The world of Frank is a dark place, populated by strange and awkward types and feels almost unreal. Not everything that happens here makes sense and it seems to be spilling over into the outside world. Who is inside it and who is outside? It is quickly clear that something else is going on, something that may have little to do with the apparent story.

I make a point of not reading other viewer’s analysis of what is going on before writing these reviews and you may want to skip the next session if you want that mystery for yourself. On the other hand, my analysis is far from complete and I may be totally wrong, so what is the harm?

Sandy and Dorothy seem to represent two opposites. Sandy is virginial and pure, innocence personified while Dorothy represents the dark, fallen and spoiled. She is sin, blood and sex, but she is also a victim. Jeffrey is attracted to both as if they represent two opposing parts of him, the civilized and pure and the almost bestial lust and craving. Dealing with these two women is Jeffrey coming of age so to speak, finding himself. The Id and Super-ego in Freudian terms.

Frank is a demon, the devil maybe. His world is depravity and violence, breaking the rules and temptation. He has Dorothy in his power and he is threatening to swallow Jeffrey. The place Frank takes Jeffrey is a demonic parallel world disassociated from the surface world and the staircase to Dorothy’s apartment is the entrance to this hell, but also a portal for Jeffery to realize his subconscious desires.

With Sandy it is usually daytime and bright colours. There is an ease and happiness to those scenes, while all scenes with Dorothy, and particularly Frank, are  night scenes with a lot of red and heaviness. There is a lot of symbolism here that could be heaven and hell, but is more likely the civilized consciousness versus messy and dark subconscious. Where the two meet things get truly messy.

If this all sounds like Twins Peaks, I do not think that is a coincidence. A lot of the imagery and themes are the same, the soundscapes are similar and even the role of Kyle MacLachlan is almost the same. This is truly Lynch territory.

I think there is something about the ambience of Lynch’ movies that appeals to me. As a viewer, I am placed in that mysterious and ominous place that is scary but also strangely fascinating. I watched the first season of Twin Peaks back in the day in the middle of the night on a hospital and that totally works, for the record. “Blue Velvet” takes me to that place and therefor it ranks pretty high with me.

Definitely recommended.

Take It Easy (1986)

Off-List: Take It Easy

The first additional movie for 1986 is the Danish pick. I ended up selecting “Take It Easy”, although I had never watched it before and selecting it solely from its interesting premise. In hindsight, I probably should have selected a different movie or skipping the Danish pick altogether for 1986.

It is the summer of 1945. The war in Europe has just ended and peacetime life is bubbling out like spring after a long winter. In the jazz bar “München” in Copenhagen, the local jazz band led the famous (in Denmark at least) pianist Leo Mathisen (Eddie Skoller) is setting the beat to the party. The patrons include rich and poor, quite a few American and British soldiers and our “heroes”, Herbert (Nikolaj Egelund) and Allan (Martin Elley).

Herbert and Martin are high school students who are more busy enjoying life than taking care of their school. They are black marketeers, which partly explains why they hang out at “München”, they chase girls, another reason, and especially Herbert wants desperately to be a jazz drummer.

To finance this ambition, he needs money, and his scheme is to rob his single mother (Helle Herz) of her valuables, selling it to the foreign solders for contraband and selling that at München.

I understand quite well that the movie is trying to give us the explosion of life after the war. Love is in the air, not just among the randy youth. Music is everywhere. Hope and optimism as symbolized by the vibrant summer pictures. Herbert and Allan are in that respect exponents for this invigorating springtime, they feel like kings to whom everything is possible and I suppose we should be loving them for it.

The problem here is that particularly Herbert is completely without a moral compass. One of the patrons at München is accusing him of lacking respect, but it is a lot worse than that. Herbert is a nihilist or maybe a narcissist who has eyes for only his own pleasure and ambition and cares nothing for what is right or wrong or other people’s feelings. That may be a good description of the average teenager, but with Herbert it is taken to the extreme and that is the essential problem with this movie. How can we care for a person who cares for nobody but himself?

I will not list all the many examples Herbert gives us of this nature, that would be tedious and pointless, but trust me, it is everywhere. What takes the cake though is when he sells his pianist mother’s beloved Steinway piano to get money for his drums. Although his friends convince him to get the piano back, his efforts are half hearted and rather than console his devastated mother, he goes to enjoy himself at the jazz bar.

For half the movie, I am waiting for two possible, redeeming outcomes: 1. Herbert get his comeuppance or 2. Herbert realize what an ass he is and aims for some self-improvement. We get nothing of the kind. Instead, the movie just ends...

I do not like Herbert one bit, but I am supposed to, and the movie cannot convince me.

This is a pretty important point against the movie. What does work though is the portrayal and atmosphere of the post-war period and especially the jazz music. For a Dane, much of the music played at the club are classics. Oldies, but classic, nonetheless. If this was enough to carry a movie, this would be a good movie. Unfortunately, it is merely background to what I can see only as a terrible story.

I do not think I will recommend “Take It Easy”.

 

Stand by Me (1986)

 

Sammenhold

“Stand by me” is based on a Stephen King story that was not in the horror genre, which in its own right is worth notice. Instead, it is a coming-of-age story made into a movie by Rob Reiner. Something also worth of notice. Rob Reiner has made a lot of very strong movies, and this was still early in his career.

In present day, writer Gordie Lahanche (Richard Dreyfuss, Will Wheaton) is reminiscing about an incident in his childhood (1959) where he and his friends went to see a dead body.

It is summer and the boys Gordie, Chris (River Phoenix), Teddy (Corey Feldman) and Vern (Jerry O’Connell) are hanging out in their treehouse (and a really cool treehouse at that). Vern has overheard his older brother talk about a body of a local boy left in the woods and so the boys decide to check that out. It is a long hike through the wilderness and when they finally get there, the body is “contested” by a group of older (and menacing) boys led by the scary Ace (Kiefer Sutherland). That is really it.

The real story however is what is happening with the boys on the walk to the body. It is quite literally an odyssey, both externally and internally.

On this walk the boys are facing a number of challenges. They escape from a junkyard owner and his menacing dog, they narrowly avoid getting run over by a train, they fall into a swamp where they get attacked by leeches and they spend a harrowing night, sleeping and standing guard in the woods before the final challenge in front of Ace.

The interesting journey however is the internal journey the boys are taking. Throughout the movie we listen to their banter and silly talk, but enmeshed in all this is a lot of uncertainty. Teddy is upset because his father is considered mentally ill and it is somehow rubbing off on him. Vern is insecure about everything. To him, just keeping up with the other boys is a victory all on its own. Chris is commonly considered a bad boy out of a bad family and the stigma is very oppressive. He is convinced he will be stuck in that role and that freaks him out. Gordie, himself, has a double problem. His brother Denny (John Cusack) has recently suffered a tragic death and though not outright blamed, Gordie clearly feels that his father would have preferred him to have died instead. Gordie is bookish and an aspiring writer, something his father has no interest in. This also means that Gordie will likely not take the same classes as his friends in the coming years and he may lose them.

Each of the boys will come to terms with their failings before the end and come out of this as better versions of themselves, so when they face Ace and his gang at the end, they know they have each other’s back. Well, at least Gordie has Chris back.

A story like this could be rather tedious and heavy handed. Both the coming of age and the odyssey themes are very old and classic, but, somehow, they are elegantly woven together here so I only realized near the end what was actually going on. Rob Reiner can probably take a lot of credit for that, but so can the four boys playing the protagonists. There is an ease to them assuming their roles that makes me believe that they really are those characters. When you think child actors, the natural reaction is to roll the eyes, but these four are very convincing and the selling point is the ease of their banter and the way they interact.

I also like very much that the tone never gets sentimental or outright silly. It is a balancing act to keep it real and you can sense that at times it must have been tempting to drive it a bit in one or the other direction. Gordie’s loss of a brother or Vern’s hunt for his penny treasure, but it never crosses the line and that makes the story very believable, and this is why I as a viewer care about these boys.

“Stand by Me” did not win a ton of Oscars and I had personally never heard of it before, but in my research, I found that this movie has been hugely influential on a lot of other filmmakers. When Jules and Vincent in “Pulp Fiction” go on and on about French burgers and what not, it is a direct reference to “Stand by Me”.

Definitely a positive experience.

  

The Color Purple (1985)

 

Farven Lilla

“The Color Purple” was Steven Spielberg’s attempt to move away from the youthful action and adventure films he had become famous for and try his hands on more serious and “adult” topics (as he called it himself). The story he chose is based on the novel of the same name by Alice Walker and there are plenty of adult themes here for his hands to work on. Incest, domestic violence, racism and poverty to mention a few.

Celie (Desreta Jackson / Whoopi Goldberg) and Nettie (Akosua Busia) are sisters in rural Georgia in the early twentieth century. Their father is abusive and as the movie opens Celie is giving birth to a child fathered by her own father, only for the child to be given away immediately.

Celie is given away as a bride to Albert Johnson (Danny Glover), whose first wife has died. Albert is just as abusive as Celie’s father so no news there, and she is as much a maid (or slave) in Albert’s household as anything else. Nettie runs away from the father and seeks shelter with Celie, but when she refuses Albert’s sexual advances, he kicks her out, kicking and screaming and even hides the letters Nettie writes to Celie over the years.

During Celie’s long “marriage” with Albert two sub-stories are in focus. Albert’s son Harpo (Willard Pugh) marries Sofia (Oprah Winfrey), a strong and stout woman who will not stand for the kind of treatment women gets in this household. She walks away with her children but eventually returns. She also gets 8 years in prison for refusing to become the maid of the white mayor’s wife.

The second story is that of Shug Avery (Margaret Avery). She is a free spirit performer who is chased by Albert. Eventually she moves into the household and befriends Celie. Over the years she seems to be coming and going a few times.

 As is clear from the above, this is a gruesome story with hardships and abuse all around. Starting out with Celie’s father siring children on his own daughter, arranged marriage, an abusive husband, racism and effective slavery. There is plenty here. In the hands of a realist filmmaker this could be a crushing movie.

Steven Spielberg is great, but he is not that kind of filmmaker. In his hands everybody comes about as... morons, as caricatures. He brought in a levity, an almost comic element, which I suppose is intended to make the movie watchable, but which I feel is mocking the characters. Rather than evil or mean, the abusive characters, whether they are the men or the white people, become clowns and fools. Yes, they certainly are fools, but that harmless veneer removes the edge of the movie. In the same vein, the black women, who are universally the victims of the story are getting a silly and hapless edge which seems to say that they are in their predicament because they are too stupid to free themselves and that is deeply unfair to the characters.

I have not read the book so I cannot tell if this actually originates there, but my suspicion is that this is the Spielberg touch and if that is the case, I think he may have been the wrong director for the movie.

His focus appears to be having Celie sit all this out patiently and overcome her hardships in a final rebellion. That is Spielberg Classic, but, I think, not really the story that needs to be told here.

There is plenty of production value her, though. The pictures are beautiful, and the acting is first class. Goldberg at the centre delivers a stellar performance and you can tell a lot of thought has gone in to recreate the era. If anything, it is almost too smooth. This is a story that may have benefitted more from a grittier production.

I suppose “The Color Purple” deserves credit for taking on the serious themes of this story. They are important, both in a historical context and in the present day, but I am not certain they were done a great service here. There is an edge missing that ultimately leaves me a bit disappointed. Spielberg would eventually make up for these flaws with “Schindler’s List”, but with “The Color Purple” the Spielberg touch missed the mark.