I saw Red Dawn (1984) at some basic and formative moment in my childhood, like many boys I grew up with in the '80s. It's basically a version of Rambo for kids - backs against the wall, all of society against you, violence and discipline WILL solve your problems. The story was (is?) highly influential for any boy (and some girls) growing up in the age of the cold war threat of the USSR, which was very real back in the '80s even as the Soviets waned.
Plot: the Russians and Cubans invade Colorado from Mexico. A renegade group of American teens head for the mountains and the woods and spend a long time resisting, slowly and painfully losing beloved friends to battles and natural rebel attrition. The Russians, impressed and annoyed, spend more and more resources fighting the teens... until finally... well, I won't give it away. I found the ending fairly anticlimactic and ambiguous.
I would hazard a guess that the movie is a Conservative's dream - the Soviet threat is very real, the self-imposed martial law of the rebels benefits everyone who follows the rules, brave American youth stand tall in the face of adversity with the help of lots and lots of guns - but it's also surprisingly dark and grim. Many of our heroes and heroines die. Many civilians are murdered. The town is blown up. The kids are essentially terrorists, although defending their nation (which no one ever seems to consider).
The cast is a classic '80s ensemble lineup - probably on par with the Breakfast Club or Hannah and Her Sisters or one of those large casts of iconic actors. Check this out: Patrick Swayze... Charlie Sheen (film debut)... C. Thomas Howell... Harry Dean Stanton.... Lea Thompson... Jennifer Grey... Powers Boothe... Frank McRae... et al. Impressive! And they're all good.
The film also LOOKS much better than I remembered. Crisp, great greens and whites of forest and snow, great red explosions, etc. Good cinematography across the board.
Directed by John Milius, the action writing and directing legend who made The Wind and the Lion, Big Wednesday, the immortal Conan the Barbarian, Farewell to the King, wrote Apocalypse Now and many others. The movie honestly feels a little long, but is worth it. It's a movie that really embodies one of the core mindsets of the '80s - the Reagan-centric anti-communist back-to-the-'50s family-first mindset seen obliquely in other movies (Back to the Future's famous obsession with the values of the '50s; the long list of pro-USA anti-communist movies like The Day After, War Games, Rambo III, Top Gun, Rocky IV, Invasion USA; the overlapping list of movies glorifying military force).
Red Dawn, predictably, was a big hit. Made for $4.2 million, it brought back $38 million - almost a tenfold return. And it makes sense - the movie hit all kinds of resonant notes in 1984, and hit enough even now that it was remade in 2012. No, I didn't see it.
Risky Business (1983), meanwhile, is a movie I both like and dislike. I like very much the atmosphere and feel of the movie; I dislike very much the emotions present in it.
The plot is pretty simple. Tom Cruise is high school senior Joel Goodsen (Good son, get it? GET IT?) and aspiring businessman, hoping to go to Princeton, whose parents go out of town on a trip. Like every '80s kid whose parents go away, Cruise goes c.r.a.z.y. He not only takes his dad's Porsche out for numerous spins - although, sadly, the Porsche doesn't stack up against the killer lineup I saw in No Man's Land earlier this week - he gets involved with a prostitute, hosts a brothel in his house, gets in a lot of hot water and has to get out of it, and has to restore the status quo by the time his parents return.
The movie has a great synthy soundtrack (Tangerine Dream!!) that I really really like. It feels extremely 1983, if that makes sense:
and
That should explain pretty well. I really like those types of orchestral/synth combinations that emerged in the early '80s.
The movie is one of a million that takes place in and around Chicago - why did Chicago feature so heavily in the '80s and '90s and now has almost totally disappeared as a locale in movies?? I miss it. The movie takes place mainly at night and looks fantastic - shadows everywhere, dark blues and greens, grays, street lights and lit windows. Well done.
The cast is solid. I actually dislike the female lead - Rebecca De Mornay in her film debut. I know they were trying for "mysterious" but her lack of emotion comes across as awkward instead. She really hit her stride in the '90s, but we will see her develop a lot as an actress throughout the '80s. Here, not so much.
Cruise is great. I'll be honest, because it's easy to smash his later work (Valkyrie, anyone??) and of course his public persona has taken a huge, huge hit - it's hard to imagine he will ever recover the insane levels of cool he had in the '80s. I've read that his use of the Ray-Ban Wayfarer sunglasses in this movie brought Ray-Ban from the edge of bankruptcy into financial success. That's how cool Cruise was.
And here he projects just the right levels of naive, ambitious, desperate, confident, fun, scared, etc. - all in turns. Like a real high school senior. He was perfectly cast. Meanwhile, I think Joe Pantoliano was perfectly cast as well as Guido The Pimp. High reedy voice, menacing body language, relies on subtext to get his threats across... it's the same role Pantoliano ALWAYS plays (see: Memento, The Goonies, Running Scared, Midnight Run, et al ... everything except his terribly miscast role as a dance show DJ in The In Crowd, reviewed last year).
The Princeton interviewer, the parents, and ESPECIALLY Cruise's high school friends (Curtis Armstrong! BRONSON PINCHOT!!!) are all pitch perfect as well. Another casting coup.
So what don't I like about the movie? It embodies a sort of materialistic nihilism I don't care for. The only thing that matter are success, sex, fast cars, big houses, Ivy League schools. Who cares about the prostitutes beyond the pleasure of the moment? Who cares about Cruise's strained relationship with his emotionally unavailable parents? Who cares about the fates of his friends? Not this movie. It is very much a product of the Me Decade.... but the darker side of it. Cruise's character is insanely privileged and I hard time feeling bad for him.
That said, the movie is still fun and moves quickly and the opening and closing voiceovers bookened it nicely. It was a huge megahit, like Red Dawn - made for $6.2 million, it made ten times that - $63 million. Written and directed by Paul Brickman, who intriguingly only made three movies, although no others in the '80s. Strange.
It's one of the iconic hits of the entire 1980's and people STILL make videos copying the famous underwear dance Cruise does right after his parents depart. I'll leave you with that famous scene:
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