Memories of Me (1988), Eye of the Needle (1981)

I really, really wanted to like Memories of Me (1988). It's the first movie directed by the Fonz, Henry Winkler, it features Billy Crystal only a year before When Harry Met Sally, and it has a premise that could have been golden.

Billy Crystal is a doctor who has a heart attack right as the movie opens. The fear of mortality upon him, he tries to make amends with his estranged father. His dad, meanwhile, is a professional movie extra - in fact, he's the King of the Extras and has longed for a part with lines. 

Crystal's dad is "Abe," played by Alan King, whose career dates back to TV in the 50s, and had a bit part in Casino. Abe gets along with everyone on earth BUT his son. So the proposed reconciliation is a real uphill journey. Meanwhile, JoBeth Williams plays Crystal's love interest who tries to facilitate the reunion.

Unfortunately the movie feels like a stage play. The camera just sort of hangs back and watches as people talk. And people talk and talk and talk and talk. Even during action scenes people just mostly talk. It's really like going to the theater instead of the movies - because things hardly MOVE at all.

There is also a really strange and bloodless sex scene between Billy Crystal and JoBeth Williams that could have been so great... but instead there is a terrible overwrought tearjerker string orchestra theme inserted over it that kills the mood; plus, Crystal and Williams really don't seem all that interested in each other. It's a surprisingly passionless embrace. Too bad. 

Wikipedia only notes that the film "wasn't a box office success." I can see why. This movie holds very little interest for anyone who isn't exactly like Billy Crystal's character.  If you aren't a Jewish doctor with a troubled relationship with your emotionally distant, chronically unfunny, and curiously hostile father, you have nothing to gain from this. 

Eye of the Needle (1981) is one of three or four spy movies where Donald Sutherland plays a Nazi killer. It's also a weird take on Lady Chatterly's Lover, but in an espionage environment - there is a lover, a undersexed wife, and a sick, invalid husband. 

Sutherland is The Needle, a murderous German spy undercover as a British citizen. They call him The Needle because his murder method of choice is the stiletto. He gets stuck on an island off the English coast, falls for the aforementioned undersexed wife, and then has to reconcile his evil spy life with the chance for love. 

There honestly is not a lot to say about this movie except that it feels very much like a holdover from the late '70s.  The haircuts, the look, everything says late '70s rather than early '80s. It doesn't push any new frontiers, doesn't contain any amazing scenes, and there is a reason it came on at 3:30 in the morning. It's a 3:30 type movie. 

The only really noteworthy sequence in the movie is the ending which, to hell with it, I will spoil for you right here and now: when he is exposed to his lover as a spy, he refuses to kill her and eliminate his final witness before escaping forever to his beloved Germany. However SHE doesn't hesitate to murder HIM. 

So the moral of the movie: don't mess with English women, it's Queen and Country first and forever with them.