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) 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).
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) 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.
Gorky Park (1983) is an adaption of a book by one of my favorite fiction writers - Martin Cruz Smith. He has a series of books about a detective in Moscow named Arkady Renko who is clever, ironic, quiet, persistent, and honest. In Soviet (and later post-Soviet) Russia, this is a decidedly less-than-optimal combination of traits.
Here, Renko is played by William Hurt - an actor I generally like despite being rather humorless in most roles... and he is totally humorless here as well. Which is not really in the spirit of the character, but whatever, no movie is ever quite like a book. Still, Hurt is something of a liability here - his stoic/deadpan demeanor along with the incredibly bleak Soviet backdrop (everything is rusted, everything is crumbling, everything is broken) means that this movie is interesting but not entertaining. The casting also needs some serious help. Brian Dennehy as an American come over at the height of the cold war to help solve a murder... well, OK. He does pretty much scream "AMERICAN!!" just from his voice and persona. But Lee Marvin as the villain was maybe not the best choice. Menacing, yes. But a good match for this plot (involving smuggled sables!) ... no. But honestly, it's really Hurt's game to lose, and lose it he does. He affects a bizarre comes-and-goes British accent, and his persona is all over the map. But, sadly, never a single moment of humanity - just this bleak philosophical blank attitude toward the whole world. It's a real letdown, considering how good the book was. The true star of the movie is the Soviet atmosphere (it was filmed in Helsinki, I believe), which is incredibly dismal and snowy and run down. It "feels" like what I imagine Soviet Russia in the early '80s to look and sound like. That alone is worth something, and so the movie isn't a total wash. But it misses out in a big way. The movie was directed by Michael Apted, who you might know from Coal Miner's Daughter, Gorillas in the Mist, Thunderheart, Nell, The World is Not Enough, and recently the Voyage of the Dawn Treader movie. A real veteran. I ascribe whatever victories this movie accomplishes to him. IMDB reports it brought in just shy of $16 million... but no data on how much it cost to make. Safe to say it was less than that and it made money at the end of the day. Meanwhile, Desperately Seeking Susan (1985) appears on the horizon. Famously a Madonna vehicle, also featuring Rosanna Arquette and Aiden Quinn and Laurie Metcalf, small roles for John Turturro and Giancarlo Esposito and my personal favorite Richard Edson in a brief cameo. Pretty decent cast for 1985, all in all. Like Xanadu last week, this movie has a really great soundtrack. Full on '80s explosion right from the beginning. Incidental music by the great Thomas Newman (American Beauty, many others). So, the plot: Roberta (Arquette) is a bored housewife who sees a series of ads in the paper that are to and from mysterious chick named Susan - including, you got it - "Desperately Seeking Susan." Curious and with nothing better to do, she heads into NYC and seeks out said Susan, just for kicks. Finding her, she gets in complicated amnesia-based hot water with the Mafia and goes on the run with Susan. Pretty typical '80s fare. The movie drips with style to spare - crazy wallpaper, zebra print luggage, leather hand wraps, the cool aforementioned jacket (has a giant glitzy Masonic pyramid on the back, designed by Santo Loquasto), wild neon arm bangles, crazy striped muscle shirts, you name it. The great soundtrack just emphasizes the thorough 80s-ness. It takes me back. This movie is really about Arquette's character, she is the lead in every way, but after Madonna's popularity apexed around the time of this film's release Arquette was actually nominated for the *supporting* BAFTA award. Crazy! Pauline Kael famously called Madonna an "indolent, trampy goddess," which I was delighted to see repeated on Wikipedia for the world to read. That is pretty accurate, actually - props to Kael. And her fellow reviewer Vincent Canby named it one of the 10 Best of the year. Does it deserve it? Hard to say. This movie is really, at the heart of things, one long music video ode to popular culture with the thinnest veneer of plot brushed over it. But it's a fun music video, and moves quickly and gives you a pretty decent feel for mid-80s New York. Aiden Quinn (80s character name of "Dez") is good, the leads are acceptable, the cameos are fun, and it moves pretty quickly. So, I guess I would recommend it. Check it out, it's a mid-80s time capsule. Meanwhile, let's end with the original demo version of Madonna's "Into the Groove," only found in this movie:
Xanadu (1980) is really a holdover from the '70s, but since it was released in our beloved ninth decade of the twentieth century, we must discuss it. It's pretty well known at this point as a campy cult classic of somewhat insane neon-drunk proportions. The director is Robert Greenwald, a TV/documentary legend who didn't make many feature films. One odd one he did was 1997's Breaking Up, a direct-to-video movie featuring Russell Crowe and Selma Hayak (!!). The point being that Greenwald perhaps doesn't have a big screen sensibility so much as a TV sensibility. One nice thing you can say about Xanadu - it is damned colorful. Bold yellows, greens, blues, reds, purples, pinks - they're everywhere. One not-nice thing you can say about Xanadu - the dialog is freaking horrendous. When our main character Sonny Malone (no, really) encounters a man sitting on a rock at the beach playing a clarinet (no, really), the dialog contains such pithy gems like "Say mister, what are you doing up there???" and then the mystery man's eventual statement that "They sure don't make rocks like they used to!!" HUH!?!??!?! HUHHHH?!?!?!? Not to mention that the old clarinet man is GENE KELLY. How did this happen? High octane this film is not. The movie is full of inexplicable and usually accidental moments, most of them unintentionally funny. I love the incredible fake scream Sonny gives when he crashes a borrowed moped off a pier, followed by a glowing orange woman zooming off into the sky. No, really. The plot is brain-dead fluff about the nine Olympic Muses (as in Ancient Greece) coming to vibrant neon roller-skating life from a bizarre mural in sunny California. The one that is Olivia Newton-John serves as Sonny's muse (he's an artist). Another dialog gem: "You. I ran into you earlier today. I never set eyes on you before today. Now I've seen you three times today. I don't believe it." Brilliant, Sonny. He doesn't need a muse, he needs an education. At age ~25, he must be the oldest kid in third grade. The highlight of the movie, of course, is the music. The soundtrack sold very well, and I actually own it on vinyl (got it free, it's a long story). It's divided up into songs by Olivia Newton-John (including the hit title track) and songs by ELO. It was a worldwide smash, number one in most countries and number four on the Billboard 200 chart.
Interesting factoid: this is actually a remake of a 1947 movie called Down to Earth with Rita Hayworth and Larry Parks. Despite the poor dialog and meh acting, the movie made a very small profit - according to Wikipedia, it cost $20 mil to make and brought home $22 mil - depending on advertising costs, it probably just about broke even. Worth seeing? Not really. I would YouTube the songs from the soundtrack, especially the big hits "Xanadu" (provided above) and "Magic," and you'll get a pretty good feel for the tone without having to sit through the rest of the mess.
A day late for Halloween (and a dollar short), I humbly present two belated offerings before moving temporarily away from the '80s horror scene: Halloween III: Season of the Witch, and Legend.
Halloween III: Season of the Witch is famous for both totally shirking the Michael Myers storyline and going off in a totally different direction with all new characters, and also for not being nearly as bad as virtually every Michael Myers sequel that followed it.
No more Laurie Strode, no more Doctor Loomis, no more Michael in his Shatner mask. Hello pieces of stonehenge used by a half-baked Irish madman to turn half-baked children's Halloween masks into horrific explosions of bugs and snakes as a sacrifice to half-baked druidic gods. Wait, I thought the Irish hated snakes?!
The plot is quite stupid. Our main character is one of the worst doctors in movie history, as he seems to be the ONLY doctor on duty on the night shift in his small hospital, yet he has absolutely no problem leaving to have a tryst with a woman, and then to essentially become an investigator into this mask mumbo jumbo.
Nevertheless, stupid beyond belief does not preclude fun. And this movie is pretty fun. It's crazy watching lasers shoot out of the TV - the masks are activated by a specific TV commercial, seen here:
As many, many reviews have noted, the plot makes no sense because of time zones. Since the commercials come on during a predetermined horror film festival on TV, the minute the East Coast put two and two together, the Midwest and West Coast are saved. Poor planning!
Also, why do the masks only come in three varieties? There is Lumpy Pumpkin, Wizard of Oz Witch, and So-So Skull. I wouldn't have been caught dead in any of them as a kid, but the kids in this movie eat them up like so much Halloween candy. No one can get enough, as if it was a fad.
Plot aside, this was an attempt by John Carpenter to mix things up. He wanted, apparently, to release a Halloween movie every year with a different unrelated story. A noble idea, executed poorly here by writer/director Tommy Lee Wallace, but a noble idea nonetheless.
Despite their bafflement, audiences came to see Halloween III in droves - on a budget of $2.5 mil, it brought home $14 mil. Impressive!
The other '80s fare tonight is the reverse: made for $24 mil, but only brought in $14.4 mil - losing about the same as Halloween III made. It's also going to be a slightly different sort of review... Ridley Scott's strange fairy tale Legend (1985) came out after his masterpieces were done: The Duellists, Alien, Blade Runner. What a trifecta!! After that, he was hit or miss: Legend, Someone to Watch Over Me, Black Rain, Thelma & Louise, 1492, White Squall, G. I. Jane, and then followed by the long slow slide into action movies starting with Gladiator.
Legend is a weird, weird movie. I'm not sure what it wants to be. I'm not sure IT knows what it wants to be. It is extremely serious, without a single intentional joke in the whole movie. It acts like it wants to be a lost Grimm tale, deadly serious and full of ominous foreboding and Big Deep Messages About Life. But ... it also comes across as silly and thin as tissue paper and is not very well acted (sorry, young Tom Cruise and young Mia Sara). Tom Cruise seems baffled the entire time and has a particularly constipated look on his face. Poor Mia Sara, who is so good in Ferris Bueller's Day Off the year after this, has nothing to do here but look vaguely distressed.
The only really compelling reason to watch this is Tim Curry in heavy makeup as a really crazy Satan. At least, I think he's Satan. He seems diametrically opposed to all good things, and if the shoe fits... Curry really hams it up and is the only cast member who seems to realize what the hell is going on.
Legend is a really big misstep for Ridley Scott. After three really unusual movies in a row, all critically acclaimed and praised heaven to heaven, I'm sure the studios assumed anything he touched - no matter how weird - would come out OK. Sadly, he didn't have the Golden Touch after all. In fact, many/most of the film he made after Legend were pretty quickly forgotten and don't have much of anything to say.
One of my younger sister's best friends in high school was obsessed with Legend, so I've seen it a number of times. But the last time I saw it I was pumped to the gills and beyond on bloody marys and taco bell. And I've got to say... it was the best I've ever seen it!!
It's a movie ripe for a Rifftrax/MST3K treatment. Myself and three friends (and two young kids) just sat and made fun of the stink cheese that is Legend... and it was fun! So I recommend viewing this one in company and under aid of inebriation.
