Easy Money (1983)

I love Rodney Dangerfield. I just do. I dig his schtick. I find him funny in pretty much every way. He drinks too much, he smokes too much, he has that sad sack face, and he gets no respect. Just none at all. 

Happily for the purposes of this blog, Dangerfield was at the peak of his popularity in the '80s and starred in three very good movies, all of them very funny. Today we'll deal with the middle film of the three: 1983's Easy Money. 

Great comedic cast! Dangerfield, Joe Pesci (with thick black hair!), Jeffrey Jones, Val Avery, Tom Noonan, Tom Ewell are the biggest ones. Also,a bonus: Jennifer Jason Leigh in one of her first post-Ridgemont roles as Dangerfield's daughter (!).

The plot here is that inveterate smoker, drinker, overeater, and above all gambler Monty Capuletti (Montague + Capulet ... someone was a Shakespeare fan) is getting married. His late mother-in-law, tired of his degenerate ways, writes a will that states (like so many movie wills) that if he cleans up his ways for one year, he will inherit 10 million dollars. 

But for Dangerfield, that is a big deal. A really, really big deal. One of the first scenes shows him placing bets on harness racing - where crazy Joe Pesci goes bananas like he will later in so many movies, and attacks a losing jockey. Does Pesci EVER play a calm, normal citizen? It would be a revelation. He's either attacking someone, being attacked, or being mocked or satirized for being so vibrantly Italian.

Anyway, this movie is similar to many "do X to inherit millions" movies like Brewster's Millions or King Ralph or a few others. As always, there is some evil character who stands to inherit the money if our hero fails - in this case it's a department store manager, since the mother-in-law owned the store. 

But this movie also surprises you in that it is fairly tender and gentle. For example, an early high point is a crazy, inspired rendition of "Funiculi Funicula" by Dangerfield at his daughter's wedding which could have come right out of a movie like Broadway Danny Rose. 

And the advice he gives his family - from the little girl in the opening scene (very funny) to his daughter - is surprisingly wise. Dangerfield shows hints of three-dimensionality, which is kind of unusual for an actor generally played for the broadest of laughs.

There is also a significant plot twist near the end involving the inheritance that I really want to spoil - what are the chances you, reading this, will someday come across this movie and then say, sighing, if ONLY it hadn't been spoiled for me - but I will withhold and say only that the twist (and counter-twist) is fairly clever and betrays a more clever writer than you'd expect. 

Which brings us to "Who wrote this, anyway?" Unsurprisingly, Rodney Dangerfield had a heavy hand. But VERY surprisingly, P. J. O'Rourke is listed as a co-writer. A big favorite of an ex-girlfriend of mine, I had no idea he was involved with anything like this. Big props to Mr. O'Rourke. And as far as I can discover, this is the ONLY movie he had a hand in. What are the odds?!?!

This is also fairly unusual fare from longtime SNL director James Signorelli. As far as I can tell, his ONLY other feature film was the Elvira: Mistress of the Dark movie (!!!). What a weird pedigree... Easy Money and Elvira. This movie is filled with strange Hollywood coincidences. 

As far as money goes, Wikipedia reports it brought in $30,000,000 - and I guarantee it didn't cost that to make, so it definitely made a lot of money. Good! Soon I'll review Back to School, probably THE classic Rodney Dangerfield '80s movie (yes, more than Caddyshack). 

And now, a treat for you: 

House of Games (1987)

House of Games (1987) is sort of the definition of an art house movie. Written and directed by noted screenwriter David Mamet, it's about a woman psychologist's descent into the world of confidence artists. As her sense of what is real and what is part of the game blurs, the viewer, too, is conned. 

On top of that is a really strange acting style I can barely describe except as "robotic." Mamet's wife Lindsay Crouse plays the main role, and everything she says is clipped and measured carefully. "Yes, I had a good night. I am going to leave now. Yes, in this taxi. This is my taxi, and I am about to drive away. Have a good night, please. Goodnight." 

Everything is like that. It heightens the surreality of the whole venture to a fever pitch. The viewer always THINKS they are one step ahead of her, but you never really are. In an early scene at a poker game, they deliberately let Crouse believe she has discovered a con - the scene is fantastic and features a wonderful Ricky Jay - but even as you sit and think "ha, she thinks she is in the know, but something is up," little do you suspect that something is WAY up and there are about eight levels of con going on. 

It's a hypnotic movie as well. It's metered out very specifically and carefully, with a deliberate pacing that refuses to give in to your desire to get a solution right away. It really helps the movie deceive you (and her). The way the movie identifies you with the woman, her journey becomes your journey. Or so you think. 

The movie also has an interesting soundtrack full of xylophones that vibrate around eerily, and it looks interesting - a shadowy look full of blacks and reds and blues. The world is off-kilter and predatory, and it lets you know from the beginning to the end. 

The cast is a murderer's row - Joe Mantegna, Ricky Jay, David Caruso, J.T. Walsh, Mike Nussbaum, more. They all perfectly inhabit their universe of mixed sleeze and respectability. 

It also features a wow ending that I refuse to spoil, but will highly recommend if you think you're interested in the kind of movie I've laid out so far. 

Raw Deal (1986), Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989)

 
One of the perils of trying to blog about every movie from the '80s is that I end up seeing more movies than I have time to write about. This week I'm going to try to catch up a little bit and cover a wide variety of things. 

Today's offering is going to be a study in complete contrasts: Arnold Schwarzenegger's most braindead film, Raw Deal (1986) against what might be Woody Allen's most cerebral, Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989). 

I should preface this by saying that like most young boys in the '80s I completely idolized Arnold Schwarzenegger (and Stallone and Ford and Willis, et al). It's easy to see why: Schwarzenegger is huge, invincible, usually the good guy, never loses, and is just a massive force to be reckoned with. He is the ultimate action hero. 

But my sister made a good point the other day: why did/does Hollywood persistently ignore his blatant Austrian-ness and instead insist on labeling him some super-American stereotype? His characters always have the most generically American names imaginable: 

• Adam Gibson (the 6th Day)
• Ben Richards (The Running Man)
• John Kimble (Kindergarten Cop)
• Douglas Quaid (Total Recall)
• Alex Hesse (Junior)
• Gordy Brewer (!!!, Collateral Damage)
• Harry Tasker (True Lies)
• Howard Langston (Jingle All the Way)
• Jack Slater (Last Action Hero)
• Jericho Cane (!!!, End of Days)
• John Matrix (!!!!!!!!!, Commando)
• John Kruger (Eraser)

I mean, come on! Adam, Ben, Gordy, three times John?? And John Matrix??? Man. 

I'm not sure why they insisted on doing this. At least Predator acknowledged his Germanity by calling him "Dutch." It's a strange phenomena, and yet I never heard anyone comment on it until now. It's like everyone just said to themselves "anyone that big GOTTA be American" and pretended the accent was just a delightful quirk. 

Raw Deal is about a former FBI agent (here named alternately Mark Kaminsky or Joe, depending on which identity he's in) who goes undercover to infiltrate the mob after the mob targets  the family of the head of the FBI. The longer story is that he was kicked out of the FBI for roughing up a suspect, and has become the sheriff of a small town in North Carolina (!!!) before he's lured back to the case with the promise of reinstatement if he can infiltrate the mob and take them down. I always wonder if deals like this really happen. 

I have to say, as a die-hard (haha) Schwarzenegger fan, this is my probably my least favorite of all his movies. It has all the requisite '80s-isms (pumping rock soundtrack with lead guitar everywhere and surprise sax solos ... macho gunfights ... bad one-liners ... endless bad guys who can't shoot straight but sure do die quick) but somehow just never clicks. It's kind of joyless. 

Schwarzenegger apparently liked making this because he finally got to wear a "normal" wardrobe (no more Conan loincloth, Terminator leather jacket, etc) and he DOES look more normal here than in most movies - suits, hair slicked back, etc. But the movie as a whole is too slow, a little dull, and doesn't have enough "pop" in it. It satisfies, but it doesn't enchant. 

The big gunfight finale in the casino is a real treat, even though it pales against Commando, Terminator, Predator, and a couple others. But apparently I'm not the only one to think so; this guy voted it #2, second only to Commando: 

http://whatculture.com/film/arnold-schwarzeneggers-top-20-greatest-action-scenes.php/20

Raw Deal was directed by John Irving - no, not THAT John Irving - who also directed The Dogs of War (1980), Ghost Story (1981), Hamburger Hill (1987), the "good" Robin Hood from the '90s (1991), and a bunch of ones that sound intriguing but that I've never seen. 

Like most of Arnold's '80s fare, it made money - although not as much or as wildly as other ones. According to IMDB it cost $8.5 million and grossed about twice that. 

Now, the pendulum swings... Crimes and Misdemeanors comes near the last part of Woody Allen's truly great period, dating roughly from Annie Hall through Manhattan and Zelig and Broadway Danny Rose and Purple Rose of Cairo and Hannah and Her Sisters and Radio Days to this movie and then roughly until Bullets Over Broadway in '94. 

Anyone who has seen Match Point (2005) has seen half of this movie - the serious half. There are several plot threads at work here, but the main one for our consideration deals with opthamologist Judah (Martin Landau) who is in crisis - his spurned mistress wants to tell his wife about their long-running affair, and Judah's financial improprieties with his business (never explicitly mentioned, but you get the idea he was using business money for personal use). Coming forward like this would destroy Judah's life - his wife has no idea, his kids have no idea, and he seems to be a respected, beloved figure both in his religious community and in New York at large. 

If it sounds familiar, it's because it's almost identical to the dilemma that Jonathan Rhys-Meyers faces in Match Point, when his affair with Scarlett Johansson threatens his up-and-coming life with his wealthy wife and her family. 

So the main plot centers around the question: What should Judah do? His choices are framed as two forks, one of which centers around his brother Jack (the masterful Jerry Orbach) who has ties to the mob and advocates rubbing the mistress out of the picture... and Ben (the subtle, excellent Sam Waterston), a rabbi going blind but faces it gracefully, and advocates coming clean, and trusting that a high power will make things right. 

But unlike Match Point, this movie is funny, as seen in the side plot featuring Cliff (Woody Allen's character), a documentary filmmaker trapped in a loveless marriage who is given the chance to make a TV biography of his brother-in-law Lester (a very funny Alan Alda), who he hates. Lester is a blowhard with all kinds of theories including the classic "If it bends, it's funny, if it breaks, it's not funny!" which he punctuates with a comment about joking about Abraham Lincoln's assassination. "Back then, you couldn't joke about it... but now, it's fair game!!" or something to that effect. Great stuff.

But Cliff's like is complicated by an affair of his own - he is falling for Halley, the producer of the TV bio, played by Mia Farrow, who is a sensitive, delicate, funny, clever character. And then Lester turns his eye toward Halley as well...

Small trivia note: Lester is apparently based on comedy writer Larry Gelbart, who is largely responsible for the character of Hawkeye Pierce in M*A*S*H. So Alan Alda is playing the man who wrote the character that made him famous; this is like Peter Dinklage someday portraying George R. R. Martin, or Mark Hamill portraying George Lucas. Kind of surreal.

The movie is bracing, funny, beautiful, has an incredible soundtrack, and a completely devastating, shocking ending. I have always suspected this movie ends the way Allen wished Hannah and Her Sisters ended - he always has claimed to regret the happy, upbeat ending of Hannah. This movie has a much more grounded, realistic ending. No spoilers, you have to see it. 

Sadly, this movie actually seems to have lost a little money - IMDB says it cost $19 million to make and brought back just shy of that. I hope it's entered the black after all these years on video, etc. It deserves it. 

As a teaching assistant for the only dedicated film professor at the University of Maryland in the 2000s, I must have seen Crimes and Misdemeanors about 25 times, maybe more. But I never tire of it. It comes together perfectly, and has a fantastic mix of elements that keeps it fresh after all these years. Among the very best of Woody Allen from his best period, and highly recommended. 

National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation (1989)

Merry Christmas, world!

Today my sister introduced me to National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation (1989). I'd seen the previous two (Vacation and European Vacation), but never this one somehow. 

Like all the Vacation movies, your appreciation really depends on how much you like Chevy Chase. I happen to not like him EXCEPT for these movies, so I'm in luck. But your mileage may differ - I know plenty of people who can't stand his well-meaning-but-oh-so-dumb persona. 

Here he yet again plays the head of the Griswald clan, and yet again the kids are played by two new kids - Juliette Lewis (!) and Johnny Galecki (!!). And the wife is the lovely Beverly D'Angelo who is pretty fun here. 

In this iteration of the formula, the Griswold family and in-laws (including a very funny Randy Quaid) assemble while various crazy antics play out: Griswald puts up a too-big tree in his living room. Griswald gets stuck in the attic. Griswald puts up an insane Christmas light display. Griswald (sort of) kidnaps his boss. Griswald Griswald Griswald. 

I especially like how he inadvertently tortures his yuppie neighbors (Julie Louis-Dreyfus and Nicholas Guest). 

This movie has a few very funny moments - his speech when he receives his "bonus" ... a few great facial expressions and reaction shots ... and a few total dud moments too (the entire opening I find almost unbearable). 

It's difficult to really describe or review a gag movie like this, so I won't try too hard. It made good money back in 1989, costing $27 mil to make and bringing back $71. The script is another gem by John Hughes, and the director is veteran TV director Jeremiah Chechik, who is probably best known for Benny & Joon. 

Nice piece of '80s trivia: the truck he races in the opening scene is Kurt Russell's work truck from Overboard (1987 and a particular favorite of your blogger, being the first movie my family saw on our VHS player). 

And sad to say, the tremendous Lindsay Buckingham song "Holiday Road" is not featured anywhere in this movie. A real loss. 

The Natural (1984)

The Natural (1984) is in the running for the Best Baseball Novel of all time; the book, by Bernard Malamud, is significantly different than the movie in various ways which I won't get into here - or else this blog will double in size as every Stephen King movie etc. will need a book review attached as well. The movie, of course, was a major hit in the early 80s - it cost around $28 million to make and brought back $47 million - almost doubling its cost. It cycled constantly on Fox when I was a kid, and I can't tell you how many times I saw it. 

The movie opens with a kid playing casual baseball with his dad, and being told he "has a gift." Then the father dies, and a giant storm knocks down a tree. The son takes the wood and fashions ... WONDERBOY. The most famous baseball bat in cinema! Probably the only named one, too. 

As a kid playing baseball in the '80s, WONDERBOY (yes, it always must be spelled in all caps) was mythic in the extreme. I knew several kids who earned their woodburning badge in Boy Scouts carving some similar name into their own store-bought Louisville Sluggers. Don Mattingly edition bat? Hell, no. Those bats were "Slaughterbat" or "Home Runn" or just a bunch of lightning bolts and crosses and stuff. 

Sadly, as The Natural makes clear, if you name a bat something special it better be made from a damned supertree downed by superlightning in a superstorm right after someone superdies. Anything less and you just got a bat from Dick's Sporting Goods with some charring on it. 

Roy Hobbs, our hero, is played by Robert Redford in one of his more/less iconic roles. The movie proper begins when he is challenged to strike out The Whammer - a major league star modeled clearly after Babe Ruth - at a country fair. The Whammer is portrayed by Joe Don Baker, who is perfect for the role. Witness to the whole event is Robert Duvall, who is actually pretty poorly cast as sportswriter Max Mercy. 

Hobbs makes his way to the big leagues ... but not before he is shot and almost killed by Barbara Hersey, in an incident sadly modeled on the real life shooting of baseball player Eddie Waitkus by obsessed fan Ruth Ann Steinhagen in 1949. Once in the big leagues, he experiences some doldrums before finally earning his true fate as a megahero in the final moments. The ending of the book is ... significantly different, and much better. 

The movie is long, too long, at 137 minutes. Yet it's not because it throws everything into the pot - on the contrary, many scenes just drag on and on. Poorly directed is our conclusion here, by Barry Levinson. Levinson is very well known for Diner, Young Sherlock Holmes, Tin Men, Good Morning Vietnam, Rain Man, Avalon, Bugsy, Toys (!), Sleepers, Wag the Dog, and a few others. Needless to say, he is capable of making good movies ... but this one somehow just doesn't mesh well. 

It has its moments - Hobbs hits the hide right off the ball; Hobbs knocks out the scoreboard; Hobbs' tryout where every ball seems to go 600 feet; etc. But all in all, there is FAR too much slow motion footage of strikeouts or homeruns or strikes or swings etc. You can really tell that Redford doesn't know the first thing about baseball and they are desperately trying to cover this up with clever cuts which come across as sad and stupid. 

Most intriguing is that the story is pretty closely based on the legends of King Arthur, and specifically Sir Percival. The broken bat = broken sword, Pop Fisher = Fisher King, the team is called The Knights, etc etc etc. (thanks to IMDB for the aforementioned examples). But the movie plays this a little too heavily and in-your-face, and the movie doesn't need it. 

Instead, the movie does best when it has Big Moments. Hobbs impressing Pop to get on the team. Hobbs and any of his various famous home runs. Etc. I wonder if maybe the 137 minutes are due to so much damned slow motion to accentuate all the Big Sports Moments. 

Great tidbit - during the moments when they show Hobbs making the headlines, the copy beneath the headlines isn't about baseball but, instead, bass fishing, a religious service, and a New York Giant fan (thanks again to IMBC trivia). 

But despite my complaints, it's still regarded as a pretty good movie, and I guess it is, in a way. I was ruined after reading the book, which treats things much differently and more realistically. The film embiggens everything, but at great cost. 

I recommend The Natural, and it's one of the better non-comedy baseball movies out there, but it's no Eight Men Out (next to be reviewed) or Bull Durham (also coming soon). 

Mr. Mom (1983)

From the production office of Aaron Spelling, circa 1983, comes ...  Mr. Mom (1983)!

This is one of a few gender role reversal movies from the 80s - 3 Men and a Baby (1987), Baby Boom (1987), Tootsie (1982, and the best of them), Victor/Victoria (1982), and probably Yentl (1983). In this one a fresh-faced Michael Keaton - in his first top-billed role - is furloughed as a car plant exec and forced to stay home and take care of the kids while his rising corporate exec wife - Teri Garr, who I always like in everything she does - goes off to the office and succeeds massively. 

The rest of the plot kind of writes itself - he struggles in the grocery store, she struggles with sexist coworkers, he struggles with crazy kids, she struggles with the glass ceiling, etc etc etc. Not much to really report here, not worth rehashing in any detail. 

Keaton is good, naturally funny and easygoing and really lives in the role. You totally believe he's just learning to do this "kid" thing. The movie was written by John Hughes - his second screenplay after National Lampoon's Class Reunion - and so it's filled with a lot of the usual John Hughesian hallmarks - families in turbulence, a cynical look at corporate America, the inevitable conflicts between work and home, parents and kids, husband and wife, etc. And, as usual, he finds a boatload of humor in it and brings it out sharply. 

The supporting cast is incredible - Martin Mull, Jeffrey Tambor, Ann Jillian, Christopher Lloyd, Fred Koehler, Edie McClurg, every corner of the movie is inhabited by some familiar face you know and, sometimes, love. 

One downside is the music. Not having seen this in many years, when the opening credits came on to a late-70s sit-com flutey little tune I was sorely disappointed. The music is - no offense to the composer - strictly TV quality. 

The movie was a huge, huge hit - according to Wikipedia it brought home $64,000,000 domestic, which was enough for studio execs to wisely say "That John Hughes... let's sign him, BUT QUICK." Which they did, to a three movie deal, and those three movies turned out to be Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Weird Science - three films in the upper upper pantheon of '80s film. 

The director is Stan Dragoti, who made only six pictures in twenty years, or roughly one every three years. Besides Mr. Mom, his other well known movie is The Man With One Red Shoe (1985), which is a great farce starring Michael Keaton's arch-nemesis Tom Hanks. Bill Simmons of Grantland.com has a great thesis that certain actors end up competing for the same roles, with the inevitable result that only one can succeed. He claims Keaton and Hanks were two that competed for the same positions until ultimately Hanks turned on the turbo and "won." 

However, the two movies Dragoti made last are the ones I knew best after this one - She's Out of Control (1989) and Necessary Roughness (1991). We'll get to the former in the course of this blog. 

I was surprised that Mr. Mom only gets a ~6/10 on IMDB. When I was a kid it was a movie pretty much everyone knew and liked and nobody would have said it was less than average. I would have guessed 7/10 at least. Very strange. 

Either way, if you haven't seen it it's worth a watch for the John Hughes script alone. There are hints of Home Alone and Uncle Buck and other later movies strewn throughout, which is a real joy for an '80s/'90s movie fan. Check it out. 

TerrorVision (1986)

TerrorVision (1986) is a surprise pick for the blog. I was home after yet another 12-hour day at the office, dead to the world and waiting for the pizza man, when I decided to see what Comcast's Xfinity On-Demand had in the realm of '80s fare. 

There was a surprising amount, and some of it will be covered soon, including a few well-known options. But I had never heard of TerrorVision and wanted something light, cheesy, stupid, and easy to watch while scarfing down righteous pizza delight along with beer and gin. 

To start, the film has a FANTASTIC theme soon that somehow combines a New Wave Elvira-type singer with B-52s camp and a weird melody sensibility out of maybe Devo or Gary Numan. CLICK HERE.  

Crazy, right? Not to mention the insane psychedelic white noise that drifts throughout.

The acting is, appropriately, absolutely horrible. They all act at the level of community theater rejects ("Sorry, Bill, you just didn't quite make the cut for Man #47 this year. Come back next June."), which leads me to believe that either (a) everyone was drunk on the set, (b) no one took it even 1% seriously and so they were all having a blast, (c) cocaine was left in giant piles on a table in the middle of the set, or (d) every single one of those. 

The movie's "plot," if you want to be nice and call it that, is simple. A doofus installing a satellite dish accidentally calls down murderous aliens from the outer spheres. The whole family is absolutely worshipful of television, which is how it should be (in the '80s or anytime). I love the absolutely insane and clearly ironic '80s culture touches - the neon magnificence of the daughter's faux-beehive, the yuppy blandness of the father and the Jazzercise housewife mother... etc. 

And then there are subtle David Lynch-esque touches here and there, like when the parents casually introduce themselves to the punk boyfriend of their daughter as swingers. Surreal, and somewhat disturbing, yet weirdly appropriate. Or when the grandfather says to his young grandson, "Remember what I told you about the 30 ROUND MAGAZINE, BOY!??!?!" Wow, you get chills. Semi-seriously. 

Not to mention the basic premise involves "training" the TV monster into a quasi-domestic "pet."

The whole movie is, in fact, a really surreal and sarcastic take on the Valley Girl culture and general '80s yuppy mentality. It's like a completely twisted neon-magnified vision of Family Ties... perhaps Family Ties meets Toxic Avenger. Which is meant as praise. 

Somewhere along the lines, someone with a brain was attached to this script. And the trail is easy to follow, since the movie was written AND directed by the same guy - Ted Nicolaou. Hats off you, Ted, wherever you are, because this movie is FUN. 

I looked up Mr. Nicolaou's IMDB resume and discovered.... I hadn't heard of a single movie of his except one, 1994's Dragonworld, although I can't remember for the life of me how I know it. I just do. 

So this is a rare never-seen-it-before '80s horror film that is actually watchable and rewatchable due to strong satirical impulse combined with very bright sets and costumes (fantastic use of color everywhere) combined with hilarious and probably deliberate overacting combined with solid and gooey gore effects.