Wednesday, October 31, 2018

Tremors


Tremors (1990)
Dir. by Ron Underwood

Starring Kevin Bacon, Fred Ward, Finn Carter and Michael Gross

Plot:

The residents of the isolated desert town of Perfection, Nevada, including two handymen, a geologist grad student, and a survivalist couple, come under attack by giant worm creatures that hunt them through vibrations in the ground.

Nostalgia:

I honestly can’t recall the first time I saw this.  It must have been on TV, as we didn’t have it on VHS until I was in high school (I taped it off of cable).  It’s just one of those movie’s that always been there in my life.  I know I watched it while I was in college, but I don’t think I’ve seen it since then.

Review:

I’ve never been a huge horror movie watcher.  I’ve always been interested in the genre, dating back to when I used to go into the video store as a kid (remember when they had those?) and look at all of the gloriously 80s box art in the section I wasn’t allowed to rent from.  But as for actually watching the movies, I’ve always seemed to prefer to read about them, and watch clips on Youtube, rather than actually sit through them in theaters.  The one big exception has always been monster movies.  From werewolves to Cthulhu, I’ve always enjoyed a good creature feature (except for zombies.  Never been a big zombie fan).

The Graboids in Tremors certainly weren’t the first monsters I ever encountered in movies.  There were a lot of monsters in the fantasy movies I grew up with, after all, from the two-headed dragon in Willow to the Ceti eels in Wrath of Khan (which gave me nightmares when I was eight).  But they were probably the most memorable one of my childhood, as they were really unlike anything else I’d ever seen before*.  Giant eyeless worm things with mouths full of tentacles, which had their own mouths – not something you encounter every day.  They were doubly impressive this time around as I realized that not only were they done entirely practically, but very frequently at full-size.  There’s just something about having an actual thirty foot long monster on-screen, a tactile presence that’s so often lacking in modern monster movies.

Now THAT's a monster
I also forgot just how much this movie is a horror comedy.  In my mind, it’s always been a horror film first and foremost, sharing the same headspace as things like Anaconda, where the humor was entirely unintentional.  Instead, it’s closer to something like Arachnophobia.  I guess the very fact that the monsters are given the name “Graboids” should have clued me in to the movie not taking itself too seriously.  Sure, a lot of people get eaten in this movie.  But it also has an endless stream of banter between the handymen Earl and Val, as well as one of the few actually enjoyable right-wing NRA enthusiasts that I can name off-hand. It’s not a coincidence that Michael Gross’s gun-toting Burt Gummer would become the star of the long-running direct-to-DVD sequel series, as he frequently manages to steal the movie from Kevin Bacon, which is no easy feat.

About the only situation where I can get behind one of these guys nowadays

Speaking of Kevin Bacon, this is probably the first encounter with the legendary Earth hero.  Either this, or The Air Up There, which I barely remember and probably won’t cover here because I’d just be yelling about cultural imperialism the whole review.  Anyway, he’s in fine form here, as a guy who’s already sick of his dead-end job in the middle of nowhere even before giant worms start eating the place.  In addition to the aforementioned Michael Gross, Reba McEntire is also actually a pleasant surprise as Burt’s wife and fellow survivalist, in what I believe was her first acting role.  She’s presented as being Burt’s equal, and the script allows her to give her husband gun advice and to open fire on the Graboids with double pistols, and never comments once on her gender. 

Bacon’s love interest, the geologist Rhonda, is also given a lot of agency.  She uses her scientific expertise to come up with a lot of the info that they use to evade and defeat the monsters, and she’s the one who comes up with the pole-vaulting technique to get them off the rock that they’re trapped on early in the film.  It’s just refreshing to see a monster movie in which none of the female characters are ever portrayed as damsels in distress, even when they are in distress.

Tremors wasn’t hugely successful at the box office despite good critical reviews, but it went on to be a huge cult classic on cable and home video, and spawned five direct-to-DVD sequels and a short-lived TV series, of varying quality.  As with many horror franchises, however, the original entry is still definitely the best one, and it held up for me just as much as it did when I was growing up.  I’m actually a little sad that I went almost fifteen years without seeing it, as it could easily slip into my regular DVD watching rotation.

Nostalgia: A-
Rewatch: A-

Stray Thoughts:

*Yes, I’m familiar with Dune’s sandworms, and Beetlejuice’s as well.  But I didn’t read Dune until college and still haven’t seen the movie, and Beetlejuice’s monsters were very cartoony stop motion animation, and really aren’t comparable at all to the Graboids.

-If “Graboids” wasn’t enough to clue you in that this is a horror comedy, the sequels have “Ass-Blasters.”  Just try saying that out loud with a straight face.

Monday, October 29, 2018

The Land Before Time


The Land Before Time (1988)
Dir. by Don Bluth

Starring Gabriel Damon, Candace Hutson and Pat Hingle

[content warning: (dinosaur) children in peril, actual child death]

Plot:

A group of young dinosaurs, led by the Apatosaurus Littlefoot, are separated from their families by an earthquake.  Together they seek out the Great Valley, the only place remaining with abundant plant life, while attempting to avoid the predation of a hungry T. Rex.

Nostalgia:

While I’ve been told that The Black Cauldron was the first movie I ever saw in theaters, and I know I saw An American Tail as well, this is the first movie that I actually remember seeing in a movie theater.  I had a Littlefoot stuffed animal that I loved growing up, and watching this kicked off a several-year-long obsession with dinosaurs.

Review:

It’s probably been a quarter century since I’ve seen this movie in its entirely.  We probably sold the VHS in a garage sale some time in middle school, and I don’t even recall watching any scenes on Youtube or anything.  However, it’s so ingrained in my childhood that I found myself recognizing scene after scene as if it had only been a couple years at most since I’d watched it.

I’m well aware of Don Bluth’s reputation for producing dark children’s fare, and from what I remember of his three other big 80s movies (The Secret of NIMH, An American Tail and especially All Dogs Go to Heaven) that’s a deserved reputation.  This movie isn’t really an exception, though I found that the antics of the young dinosaurs cut the darkness with significant levity in a way that I don’t remember from the other films.  While most of the movies have a single comic relief character (usually voiced by Dom DeLuise), all five of the main dinosaurs here take turns providing the physical comedy.  When you think about it, the concept of five dinosaurs, who may or may not be orphaned, who have to travel across a deserted, blasted landscape while being stalked by an enormous predator, is inherently dark and disturbing, so the extra humor to break the mood was actually quite appreciated.


The animation itself is simply gorgeous.  A relatively large part of the movie is dialogue-free, which allows even more emphasis to be placed on the artwork, especially all of the backgrounds.  This was also the first major dinosaur movie made after the 1970s renaissance in paleontology, and the animators clearly showed their work, at least up to the level of knowledge they had available in the mid-80s.  These clearly aren’t the swamp-dwelling, sluggish creatures of prior decades (and films), even if they do get a couple of dinosaurs from different periods mixed together.

I actually liked all of the vocal performances, even the “annoying” ones, and also appreciated the decision to leave Sharptooth the T. Rex unvoiced, as it’s just as much of a force of nature for Littlefoot and co. to overcome as any of the earthquakes and tar pits.  While on the subject, I do feel like I need to touch on the tragedy of Ducky, whose voice actress, Judith Barsi, would be murdered by her own father before the movie would come out in theaters.  I really can’t think of either this or All Dogs Go to Heaven without thinking of her (and if you’re not crying yet, Ducky’s “Yep Yep Yep” catchphrase is inscribed on her tombstone).

Another thing I’d completely forgotten about in the intervening decades was just how short this movie is.  Animated movies not produced by Pixar tend to be on the shorter end as is, but this movie was short even for most theatrical animation, barely making the 70 minute mark.  From what I’ve read, over ten minutes of completed animation had to be cut out of the movie to earn a G rating (this was a time when G was the expected rating for all animation.  The first Disney movie to get a PG rating, The Black Cauldron, had debuted only a couple of years earlier, and had bombed in part as a result).  This included fairly graphic sequences of Sharptooth mauling Littlefoot’s mother, a scene that remains in the movie only in the form of shadows against a wall.  Reportedly, Steven Spielberg himself, no stranger to child endangerment in his movies, told Don Bluth that he’d have “kids crying in the lobby” if he didn’t make the edits.  As far as I know, none of the removed footage has ever shown up on any print or home media release, but I’d love to see it if it ever became available.



Inexplicably, this rather dark, dangerous dinosaur journey would go on to spark a very long-running franchise of happy, bright direct-to-DVD animated musicals.  I wonder how many of the kids who grew up with those movies have ever gone back to watch the original, and been completely shocked by how different from them it is.  While it’s a little too slight for it to have a lot of rewatch value for me now, especially when compared to Bluth’s other 80s movies, I can still definitely appreciate the impact it had on me as a child.

Nostalgia: A
Rewatch: B

Stray Thoughts:

-I didn’t mention it above, but the score for the movie, composed by James Horner, is really quite excellent as well, and gets more of a spotlight than most scores due to the lack of dialogue in a lot of scenes.

-My favorite scene in the movie is actually the one scene that has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the narrative.  For about two minutes, the movie comes to halt while we watch a group of small pteradons fight wordlessly over a cherry, until eventually another unrelated lizard saunters up and eats it.  They’re all dejected, until the mother shows up with a cherry for each of them.  Finally, as they’re walking away, they pass a depressed-looking Littlefoot, and one of them attempts to give their cherry to the dinosaur to cheer him up.  It feels like something out of the golden age of Disney animated shorts, and I found it positively charming.

Friday, October 26, 2018

Red Sonja

It’s telling that Arnold’s only in the movie for
about half an hour, yet he’s larger on the poster
than the actual lead

Red Sonja (1985)
Dir. by Richard Fleischer

Starring Brigitte Nielsen, Sandahl Bergman and Arnold Schwarzenegger

[content warning: sexual assault, evil lesbians trope]

Plot:

 A female warrior is tasked by her dying sister to recover and destroy a power magical artifact that has been stolen by an evil queen, before its power grows out of control and it destroys the world.  Along the way, she is joined by a deposed prince, his servant, and Conan the Barbarian Kalidor of Hyrkania.

Nostalgia:

This is one that we had taped off of TV sometime in the early 90s.  I watched it a couple times, but it never really caught my imagination the way even something like Beastmaster did.  I included it in a bad movie marathon that I ran in college, but I believe that was the last time I’ve seen it before this viewing.

Review:

As I discussed back in my Beastmaster review, the unexpected success of Conan the Barbarian in 1982 kicked off a sword and sorcery movie boom that lasted until the middle of the decade.  While The Beastmaster might have been the first movie out of the gate during that boom, Red Sonja just about represents the last gasp of the genre, at least for the major Hollywood studios.  It was a certified bomb at the box office, making less than half of its production budget.  While there would be fantasy films released theatrically after this (Labyrinth, Legend, The Princess Bride), there wouldn’t be another medieval-set action/fantasy movie like this until Willow, three years later.

Other than possible genre fatigue, I blame the end of the movie boom on the movies not actually being any good.  Red Sonja is an excellent example.  This movie, frankly, sucks.  It’s only 90 minutes long, yet I found myself getting bored halfway through, and was actually struggling to remain awake by the end.  It had a higher budget than Conan the Barbarian, but looks significantly cheaper. It’s as if they blew 75% of the budget on getting Arnold (who’s only actually in the movie for maybe five minutes before the halfway mark), and had to skimp on everything else as a result. 

Okay, they had one set that made decent use of a low budget. It's still lit terribly, though.
That presumably includes all of the non-Arnold actors, as everyone else is universally terrible.  And when Arnold Schwarzenegger is the best actor in your movie, you’ve got problems.  Brigitte Nielsen, who plays Sonja, had never acted before this, and was discovered by the producers while modeling in Italy.  She was only cast a bare eight weeks before production began, which isn’t a lot of time for an acting crash course.  She’d go on to have a respectable career as a B-movie actress, but she’s extremely wooden and stiff here.  While Nielsen was a beginner actress, Sandahl Bergman doesn’t really have an excuse.  She went from winning a Golden Globe for Best New Actress in Conan to a (deserved) Razzie Award nomination here for her turn as the evil Queen Gedren.  And child actor Ernie Reyes Jr. turns in one of the most annoying performances of the 80s as the deposed Prince Tarn. 

It’s Sir Legally-Distinct-From-Any-Previous-Character-I’ve-Played!

Speaking of the queen, let’s talk about her characterization, especially its use of a particularly annoying and noxious trope.  Namely, she’s an Evil Lesbian, and it’s implied that being a lesbian is part of what makes her evil.  She’s introduced at the beginning of the movie when she sexually assaults the young Sonja, and then orders Sonja’s gang rape and the murder of her family when Sonja resists and injures her face.  Later on, during their end-of-film confrontation, Gedren claims that the destruction of the world is of less consequence than the scar Sonja left on her cheek.  Even Sonja, for all of her badass warrior independence, has still sworn an oath to not have sex with any man that can’t beat her at combat – which leads pretty much every male with a sword in the movie to challenge her to a fight in order to get her into bed. 

So yeah, between the bad dialogue, worse acting, boring action, cheap sets and morally dubious sexual content, there’s very little to recommend this movie.  It’s definitely not one of those movies that deserves a so-bad-it’s-good watch.  However, the concept of Red Sonja itself is one that I could see working, especially in a post-Fury Road/Wonder Woman action environment.  80s remakes are en vogue right now, so how about this one?  It couldn’t be much worse.

Nostalgia: C+
Rewatch: F

Stray Thoughts:

-It’s billed as being based on a character created by Robert Howard, the writer of Conan, but that’s not really true.  It’s actually based on the Marvel Comics character (making this actually a comic book movie), who was a composite character compiled from several Howard side characters.

-Arnold himself considers this the worst movie he’s ever been in.  He’s been quoted as saying “when my kids get out of line, they're sent to their room and forced to watch Red Sonja ten times.”

-There’s one scene that I definitely don’t remember from our VHS.  At one point, Queen Gedren has her court wizard use a magic mirror to spy on Sonja, but instead the image of a naked belly dancer comes up.  It’s literally a fantasy version of the computer tech caught looking at porn during a meeting, and seems like it comes from a more modern parody film (say, Your Highness) rather than from anything in the 80s.

Wednesday, October 24, 2018

The Flight of Dragons


As a TV movie, it didn't have a poster. But I like this 
homemade one by Ursula Lopez on Redbubble
The Flight of Dragons (finished in 1982, not released until 1986)
Dir. by Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass

Starring James Earl Jones, John Ritter and Harry Morgan

[content warning: burning to death, icky romantic behavior towards a child]

Plot:

Faced with the weakening of magic caused by the rise of scientific reasoning, three of the four great wizards attempt to seal off the realms of magic from the rest of the world, only to be opposed by the Red Wizard Ommadon.  To defeat him and save magic, they recruit a knight, a dragon, and a man of science from the 20th century, Peter Dickinson.  However, before the quest can begin, a magical mishap causes Dickinson’s mind to be placed in the body of the dragon.  The quest must go on, though, so Dickinson has to save magic and learn to be a dragon at the same time.

Nostalgia:

My relationship with this movie and its source material is an interesting one.  It was originally produced as a TV movie, and that’s how I first saw it, multiple times on cable somewhere between the ages of nine and twelve.  I never managed to catch it at the beginning to tape it on VHS, though, and over time I completely forgot about it.  Flash forward to my junior year in high school, and I’m an avid reader of fantasy novels.  A friend in one of my English classes recommends a book to me, The Dragon and the George by Gordon R. Dickson, and lets me borrow a copy.  Through the first hundred pages or so, I had a growing sense of familiarity with it, but couldn’t place where I was recognizing it from.  Then I got to the sandmirks scene, and I suddenly remembered.  While the movie had billed itself as being adapted from the book of the same name by Peter Dickinson, the actual plot of the movie was from the Dickson novel I was reading.

Review:

This is the first request I’m doing for a review, and it actually turns out to be a movie that I probably should have had on my list to begin with.  The story I related above is actually one of the “OMG” moments as a fantasy reader that I remember the most strongly.  I’ll get into the differences between the book(s) and the movie more later on, but for now I’d like to focus on the actual movie itself.

Despite being written and produced by an American production company, Rankin/Bass (most famous for their stop-motion Christmas movies), it has a lot more in common visually with 1980s anime.  Of course, this is because Rankin/Bass farmed the actual animation out to the Japanese firm Topcraft, which also did the animated Hobbit movie and The Last Unicorn (Topcraft itself would go bankrupt in 1985, and was bought by Hayao Miyazaki and renamed Studio Ghibli.  Yes, that Studio Ghibli).   Like the two previous projects, Flight of Dragons has a highly distinctive style that immediately sets it apart from a lot of the other animation being aired in America at the time.  It also has a top-notch voice cast.  Other than a couple cases where Bob McFadden’s British accent noticeably slips, I enjoyed pretty much everyone.  And you can never go wrong casting James Earl Jones as an evil wizard.

Speaking of the wizards, they were actually surprisingly diverse given the era that the movie was produced.  While the main wizard character, Carolinus, is a white Gandalf type, the two other good wizards are Chinese and ambiguously brown (though coded as Middle Eastern by his costume).  The movie also scores a couple of points on the gender front, with a badass female archer joining the quest and her gender never being called into question for it.  Unfortunately, however, this is undercut quite a bit by the other female character, Carolinus’s adoptive daughter Melisande (and yes, I really want to put an R in there every time I type it).  Her only purpose in the film seems to be serving as a love interest.  Not only does she have a love-at-first-sight plot with Dickinson, a trope I hate, but there’s an even ickier bit between her and the knight, Sir Orrin, that I’d completely forgot about.  While relating his backstory to Dickinson, he tells about meeting Melisande for the first time when she was about five, and immediately vowing to fall in love with and marry her, “when she was old enough, of course.”  Umm….how about no?  In fact, can we just take that whole conversation and burn it, please?

This feels like one of those joke contests where you have to
come up with a funny caption

This movie is an amalgamation of two very different sources: a speculative non-fiction book called The Flight of Dragons, in which a biologist attempts to theorize how the standard mythological dragon traits (breathing fire, etc.) could have evolved to work biologically, and a fantasy novel by Gordon R. Dickson, in which a medieval history doctoral candidate and his fiancée get transported to a fantasy version of 13th century England, and he accidentally ends up in the body of a dragon.  The two have very little to do with each other, and are a fairly awkward fit together.  Most of the Flight of Dragons content comes in a couple of scenes in the middle, where the narrative comes to a screeching halt while Dickinson learns how dragons work.  I don’t know why they didn’t just adapt The Dragon and the George straight through, as they’ve already got about 80% of the plot present.  Maybe they thought the character (called Jim Eckert in the book), wouldn’t be as relatable to the target kid audience if he was in his 30s with a fiancée?  If that’s so, why then have the entire final confrontation hinge on Dickinson’s knowledge of science and mathematics, with him spouting off multiple theorems and equations in rapid fire?  For being aimed at kids, there’s sure a lot of five dollar words being thrown around.

The movie is also incredibly dark for a kids’ movie.  Not quite Don Bluth dark, but there was a lot higher body count than I was remembering.  The final confrontation ends with a near total party kill, with only Dickinson surviving.  Yes, they all got brought back at the end, but that doesn’t discount the scene of Sir Orrin literally getting set on fire, then slaying the evil dragon that did it while he burns to death.  There’s also a scene where Dickinson-as-dragon and his elderly dragon mentor get incredibly drunk at an inn and sing drinking songs together, while Sir Orrin and Danielle the archer head off to a room holding hands after she proclaims it could be their last night alive.

Don’t know why scene didn’t give me nightmares as a kid
So I did enjoy this rewatch, but couldn’t help spending most of the running time comparing it to the book.  It’s a pretty good kids’ movie (what nine-year-old wouldn’t want to turn into a dragon?), but I’d actually recommend anyone interested to actually skip the film – it’s pretty hard to track down at the moment, having only ever been released on DVD as a burn-on-request title from Amazon – and read the book instead.  It’s got pretty much all of the scenes that this one does, plus a better ending (which is whited-out below for the spoiler-conscious).

Nostalgia: A-
Rewatch: B-

Stray Thoughts:

-[ending spoilers for The Dragon and the George - highlight to read]:  In the movie, Peter Dickinson rejects magic and returns to the 20th century, with the Princess Melisande deciding to join him.  In the book, Jim Eckert, a soon-to-be-married academic trying to live on student loans and his fiancee's teaching assistant salary, says "Screw that, I have a castle!" and stays in fantasyland.  He becomes human again, and inherits the lands and title of an evil knight he'd defeated as a dragon.  There are actually half a dozen more books, where he becomes a magical apprentice under Carolinus, learns to become a dragon at will, and is called into service fighting for the king in France.

-They included pretty much every character from the book, except for my favorite: Welsh archer Dafydd ap Hwyel.  I guess two archers would have been too much for them?

-There was talk a couple of years ago about making a live-action sequel to the movie, based on the second book in the series, The Dragon Knight.  I’m sure it’s been dropped by now, since I would have heard something about it otherwise, but it’s something I wish had been picked up.

Cutest. Dragon. Ever.


Monday, October 22, 2018

The Mighty Ducks


The Mighty Ducks (1992)
Dir. by Stephen Herek

Starring Emilio Estevez, Lane Smith and Joshua Jackson

Plot:

A successful but arrogant asshole Minneapolis attorney is sentenced to community service coaching youth hockey following a DUI arrest.  He is assigned to the worst team in the league, an underfunded squad without much in the way of talent or equipment.  Resistant at first, he starts to embrace the team when he begins a rivalry with his old coach from when he was a youth player himself, who still blames him for blowing the shot that would have won the championship.

Nostalgia:

I wasn’t big on professional sports movies growing up.  Rocky, Field of Dreams, Major League…couldn’t have cared less.  However, for some reason I watched a lot of youth sports movies, and this one was my favorite.  Maybe it was growing up in Detroit, a city that still bears the nickname “Hockeytown,” during the era of the Russian Five.  Whatever it was, I probably watched this several dozen times between the ages of 10 and 16.  It never made the jump to DVD in our house, though, so I haven’t seen it since I stopped watching VHS around 2004.

Review:

Sports movies, especially underdog ones, have a very definitive formula.  A new coach comes in, takes over a terrible team with untalented players, and suffers a few humiliating losses, before rallying the players around him and improbably winning the big game at the end.  If the movie’s a comedy, the players will often have bizarre and distinctive quirks to make them stand out, and which will usually factor into the team’s victory in some fashion.

The Mighty Ducks doesn’t really break that mold at all.  It’s almost a remake of The Bad News Bears with the sport changed, the only major difference being that unlike the Bears, the Ducks actually win the final championship game.  The movie still has the major theme of obsessive competitiveness being bad both for the kids and their coaches, though it does throw an extra narrative wrinkle into the mix by having the Ducks’ ultra-aggressive rival, the Hawks, be the childhood team of their new coach.  It does seem to be a little bit of stretch, however, to imply that most of Coach Bombay’s personal problems stem from a single blown shot twenty years ago.  Letting go of his old team and their win-at-all-cost attitude is Bombay’s main character arc, and while it’s a believable lesson to learn, hinging his entire character on a single experience was a bit much for me.


In fact, if you look a bit closer at the plot, the movie actually manages to undercut its own message.  At the beginning of the movie, Bombay is seen in court, using dirt that he’s dug up about the presiding judge to get an objection against him overruled.  It’s an underhanded tactic that leads to a victory, but gets him chewed out by both the prosecutor and his own boss.  Later on, he’s shown to be using the same dirty tactics with the hockey team, teaching them how to cheat by taking falls instead of actually learning how to play.  If the lesson Bombay is supposed to learn is that having fun and coming together as a team is more important than winning, you’d expect him to change his tactics over the course of the movie.  However, late in the film he informs the league that Hawks star player Adam Banks is living in an area that was redistricted, and is therefore ineligible to play for them.  He does this without first approaching the Hawks or Banks’s family, using it as a gotcha tactic right before a game.  This is exactly the same sort of dirty tactic that he was shown using earlier in the movie.  Sure, this time it’s done to correct an injustice rather than create one.  But try telling that to Banks.

Overall, I actually find that I don’t have a whole lot to say about the movie.  It’s a perfectly fine kids’ sports movie, with a nice performance from Emilio Estevez at the center.  But it’s not much more than that.

Nostalgia: B
Rewatch: C+

Stray Thoughts:

-This movie kicked off a whole mini industry of sports movies with kid protagonists.  Within two years you’d have Rookie of the Year, Little Big League, Little Giants and the Angels in the Outfield remake.  I’d include The Sandlot as well, but that movie is both a period piece and more a coming-of-age movie that just happens to involve baseball.

-Yes, this is the movie that inspired the original name of the Anaheim Ducks NHL franchise, which was added as an expansion team the year after the movie, and was originally owned by Disney.

-I grew up watching Lois & Clark on TV, so seeing the actor who played Perry White be so nasty here caused a fair bit of cognitive dissonance when I was young.

-I won’t be covering it, because I’ve only seen it once and have no nostalgia for it (and it’s not that good), but the third Mighty Ducks movie was actually filmed in part at my alma mater, Carleton College.

Friday, October 19, 2018

Ladyhawke


Ladyhawke (1985)
Dir. by Richard Donner

Starring Matthew Broderick, Rutger Hauer and Michelle Pfeiffer

Plot:

A fast-talking thief escapes from a medieval French dungeon, only to be waylaid by a swordsman who wants his help to break back in.  Over the course of their travel, the thief learns of the curse affecting the swordsman and his lover: he turns into a wolf at night, and she turns into a hawk by day.

Nostalgia:

This is another 80s fantasy film that I grew up with, that I haven’t seen in ages now.  I remember watching it a lot on VHS, though we never got the DVD for it, and I probably haven’t seen it since the late 90s.  I do remember watching it once in high school, specifically because I watched it in a double feature with Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and it was my first time seeing the latter.

Review:

In the wake of the success of the Lord of the Rings films, Hollywood’s fantasy output seemed to narrow down to two subgenres: world-shaking epic fantasy blockbusters, or YA adaptations with young protagonists.  Sometimes the two would cross with each other, resulting in things like Eragon.  In most cases, these were big-budget potential franchise starters, with copious CG and action writ large.

However, Hollywood used to produce a much different sort of fantasy film.  Prior to the 90s CG revolution, which helped to make secondary-world fantasy like LotR more feasible, a good portion of the fantasy movies made were essentially medieval dramas with a couple of wizards or dragons thrown in.  Conan the Barbarian and The Beastmaster, for all of their Bronze Age grandeur, are essentially the story of one man using his sword to survive, and accidentally falling into some semblance of a quest in the second half of the film.  Even in The Princess Bride the stakes are personal ones: Buttercup’s life, and Inigo’s revenge.  No giant clash of armies, no apocalypse to avert, no evil warlock with plans for world domination.


Ladyhawke is very much a part of this tradition, and possibly one of its finest examples.  It’s essentially a cursed love triangle, played out on the backdrop of 13th century France.  Other than some nameless henchmen, there are only seven significant speaking roles in the whole movie, and most of it is shot outdoors on location, with the occasional ruin or inn thrown in.  It’s a very small, intimate film, almost entirely unlike modern fantasy.  In fact, the “fantasy” aspects of the movie are extremely limited, being mainly restricted to the titular curse and a fortuitously timed eclipse at the climax.  If it took place in a modern setting, I’d say it was more magical realism than fantasy.


Now, all of this isn’t to say that the movie isn’t any good in comparison to modern fantasy.  In fact, I enjoyed it quite a lot.  Matthew Broderick in particular was quite amusing, as the escaped thief who keeps up a running dialogue with God about his attempts to reform and the mixed messages that fate is sending him.  It’s not quite the fourth-wall breaking that occurs in Ferris Bueller, but it provides some levity in an otherwise heavy story.  I also enjoyed Rutger Hauer as the taciturn Navarre, single-mindedly fixated on killing the bishop that cursed him even when a way to break the curse is presented to him.  I’m pretty sure he couldn’t actually throw his zweihander like a javelin, however, something he does more than once.

That...is not how you use a two-handed sword

While I’d say that most of the film holds up quite well (and Broderick’s more modern-sounding character is actually ahead of his time), there’s definitely one aspect that immediately dates it, and rather badly at that: the score.  Written in part by Alan Parsons, it’s one of the most 80s-taculur pieces of synthesizer prog rock I’ve ever heard.  The main theme sounds like the intro to an NES Mega Man game.  There’s some token cues with more traditional orchestral score, but these are few and far between.  Broderick’s dialogue didn’t manage to take me out of the movie, but the music almost did.

My other major complaint is that this is a movie whose plot hinges around two characters who transform into animals daily, and yet there’s no actual transformation sequence in the movie.  It always happens offscreen, the closest we get being some blown-out closeups of Michelle Pfeiffer’s face with some fluttering wings superimposed over top.  Since this is the central magical conceit of the film, it's definitely a major missed opportunity.  Come on, Donner!  Your budget was higher than either American Werewolf in London OR The Thing.  You’ve gotta give us something!

Ahem…Anyway, I think that for the most part the movie’s still an enjoyable watch.  A little dated in some ways, a lot dated in others, but overall I’m positive on it.  I still prefer Willow, but it’s definitely better quality than some of the other fantasy films I’ve watched for his project (I’m looking at you, Krull).

Nostalgia: B-
Rewatch: B-

Stray Thoughts:

-This is one of the only movies I can think of where Rutger Hauer doesn’t play a villain.  He does bring some of those sinister overtones to Navarre, though, especially in the early going before you learn about the curse.

-You know, the movie spends over a third of its running time before you find out about the curse.  Maybe they shouldn’t have put the reveal in the title.

Wednesday, October 17, 2018

The Last Dragon


Kung fu and disco.  Two tastes that sorta taste
alright together?
The Last Dragon (1985)
Dir. by Michael Schultz

Starring Taimak, Vanity and Julius J. Carry III

[content warning: cultural appropriation and stereotyping, stalking]

Plot:

An African-American martial artist, “Bruce Leroy” Green, must rescue a popular video DJ from a corrupt video game entrepreneur and his henchman, a rival martial artist/gang leader called the Shogun of Harlem.

Nostalgia:

Like The Beastmaster, this must have been one of those movies that was in constant rotation on basic cable in the early 1990s.  I saw it enough times to still be able to remember several sequences, though I don’t think I’ve seen it since at least when I was in college at Carleton in the early 2000s.

Review:

This might be the weirdest movie I’ve rewatched for this project, which is saying something considering I’ve watched movies with video-game-playing starfighters, inflating henchmen, shrinking test pilots, armies transforming into pigs and pre-teens fighting Dracula.  It’s a Blaxploitation kung fu musical, a genre mix that I never thought I’d be typing.  It’s kinda pretty bad, but the bad parts aren’t actually what you’d expect given that genre and plot description.

For one, the martial arts action is surprisingly one of the strengths of the movie.  The lead actor, Taimak, is an actual martial artist, holding black belts in multiple styles, and the fights were choreographed by famous karate competitor and instructor Ron Van Clief.  Taimak isn’t much of an actor, and pretty much every scene where he had significant dialogue was cringe-worthy, but I definitely bought him as a fighter impressive enough to have been nicknamed “Bruce Leroy” by the community. 

One thing I never really bought was the movie’s villain, a businessman who apparently made enough money from running video game arcades to set himself up as a wannabe mobster.  We see him with henchmen, expensive penthouse apartments, and enough money to shoot elaborate music videos to jumpstart his girlfriend’s singing career, but never really get the sense that he’s really any sort of actual villainous threat.  As such, his plot to kidnap Vanity’s character and force her to play the music videos doesn’t really cause much tension.  I just couldn’t take him seriously.  The secondary villain, Sho’nuff the Shogun of Harlem, is actually more credible of a threat.  He’s clearly the leader of a street gang, and throws his weight around both metaphorically and literally from the moment he’s introduced.  Unfortunately, the movie saddles him and his gang with absolutely ridiculous costumes for most of the movie: knockoff samurai robes and an afro tied into an imitation of a topknot. 



Speaking of that, this movie resides in an interesting place on the border of cultural appropriation.  When Sho’nuff is first introduced, crashing a rowdy showing of Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon, Leroy Green is watching the movie while wearing a Mandarin-collared jacket and a straw hat, and is eating popcorn with chopsticks.  He idolizes Bruce Lee to the point of wearing the yellow track suit from Game of Death when teaching his class, bows to his consternated parents before dinner, and frequently spouts off vaguely Confucius-sounding words of wisdom. 

However, I didn’t have the sort of negative reaction that I did to movies like Remo Williams.  For one, there are multiple actual Asian characters in the film, played by Asian actors.  While Leroy’s kung fu master initially appears to be the stereotypical “wise elderly martial artist,” he also pulls a movie-long practical joke on his pupil before flying off to visit his mother in Miami.  Leory also gets called out for his appropriation during the course of the movie.  While attempting to complete his master’s futile request by breaking in to a fortune cookie factory, Leroy’s attempts to talk his way past the employees are very quickly rebuffed by the Asian-American New Yorkers who are offended at him wearing what they see as a racist caricature of Asian clothing. He eventually resorts to bluffing his way past them by adopting a stereotypical “black” accent and clothing and pretending to be a pizza delivery man.

They've kinda got a point

In fact, you could say that a major theme of the film is appropriation, assimilation and pretending to be something that you’re not.  Instead of the stereotypical soul food restaurant, Leroy’s father is proud to run the only African-American-owned pizza place in the neighborhood.  Eddie Arkadian and his girlfriend are both from rural upstate New York, pretending to be a mobster and pop star respectively.  Sho’nuff is just a street thug who’s adopted samurai pretensions.  Finally, it’s only when Leroy stops searching for an Asian master to train him, and accepts that he can be his own master without having to learn further from another culture, that he is able to finally defeat Sho’nuff.

This is far from a great film.  The dialogue is pretty terrible, the villain is weak, and the romance is cringe-worthy.  However, it’s also way too silly to really take seriously, and as a result I found myself actually enjoying a fair bit of it, especially the action parts.  Not sure I’ll rewatch it again any time soon, but I’d watch it again before I rewatched Remo Williams.

Nostalgia: B
Rewatch: C+

Stray Thoughts:

-I called it a musical, though it’s not a musical in the traditional sense.  There’s only one instance where a character actually breaks into song during the narrative.  However, the music industry plays a heavy role in the plot (the love interest is a video disc jockey, and the villain’s girlfriend is an aspiring singer in the Cyndi Lauper mold), and full-length music videos get played more than once throughout the movie.  Even the one actual musical song is a live performance given on-stage.  There are also multiple montages throughout the movie, each set to a different 80s Motown artist.  Of course, the movie was produced by Motown Records head Berry Gordy, so the fact that the movie’s essentially an MTV set with breaks for fight scenes makes a bit of sense.

-Every time the movie threatened to get a little serious, it would undercut itself with something supremely silly.  There’s a scene literally taken wholesale from Blazing Saddles, in which the villain auditions a series of thugs and murderers to be his new henchmen.  It ends with one of them headbutting a table in half while barking like a dog.

-One thing I found much sketchier this time around was Leroy’s little brother, who’s maybe fifteen tops, and has an obsession with Vanity’s DJ.  He repeatedly talks about getting her to fall in love with him, and refers to her as “his woman” despite the fact that they’ve never met.  He comes off as way more stalkerish now than I think they’d intended at the time.

-There’s a brief cameo by an almost unrecognizably-young William H. Macy.

Monday, October 15, 2018

The Hunt for Red October


Sean Connery's head is coming for you!
The Hunt for Red October (1990)
Dir. by John McTiernan

Starring Alec Baldwin, Sean Connery, James Earl Jones and Scott Glenn

Plot:

During the 1980s, the captain of the Soviet Union’s newest high-tech submarine goes AWOL with the vessel while on a training mission.  While most of the American military thinks that he’s gone rogue and is attempting a strike on the U.S., CIA analyst Jack Ryan believes that he is trying to defect instead.  But how can he prove this before the sub gets close enough to launch its missiles?

Nostalgia:

Even though this is a PG movie, I’m pretty sure I didn’t see it until I was in middle school at least.  I certainly have no memories of having seen it before about the age of 13, a good five years after it had come out.  But I know I'd seen it several times before I finally got around to reading the book.

Review:

My senior year in high school, and continuing on into my first year of college, I went on a big Tom Clancy kick.  I read four or five of his novels in a row, before getting bored and wandering back to epic fantasy again.  Of those, the only one I have strong memories of is The Hunt for Red October, his first novel.  I found both the book, and the later movie that was based on it, to be highly effective and enjoyable espionage thrillers.  They’re also quite atypical for Hollywood action fare.

The book might be an airport paperback, but it’s surprisingly lacking in the violent tropes of most spy thrillers, a trait that carries over into the quite excellent film.  Instead of shootouts, chases and escapes, the action is of a much more cerebral variety.  Our hero, Jack Ryan, isn’t yet the clichéd action hero that he’d become in later books and films in the franchise.  Here, he’s a desk-bound analyst, his military career cut off before it could begin by a helicopter accident that left him with a bad back and a fear of flying.  He spends most of the movie having to outthink both Captain Ramius and the Soviet navy pursuing him, and he doesn’t even come into contact with Ramius and the Red October until the final twenty minutes.  As such, Alec Baldwin is perfect casting – believable as someone who might have had military training a decade ago, but not as stereotypical an action hero as Harrison Ford or Chris Pine, both of whom would later go on to portray the character.


On the other side of the equation, we have Sean Connery, in one of his last great performances as Captain Marko Ramius.  A lot was made at the time about his complete lack of any attempt to do a Russian accent, and how his thick Scottish took a lot of reviewers out of the movie.  I, for one, have no problem with it at all, and I actually think that it logically fits the character.  Most of the other Russians in the film are played by either British actors, or European/Australian actors using British accents.  They also establish that Ramius isn’t Russian, instead being Lithuanian.  Russian isn’t his native language, and he’s probably speaking it with an accent.  Therefore, having a Scottish accent in the midst of the British ones actually fits for his character’s background, as well as further enhancing his maverick status in the Russian military.

Since this is a military movie set during the Cold War, the complete and total lack of female characters makes some logistical sense (there’s a blink-and-you-miss-it cameo from Gates McFadden as Ryan’s wife, and a couple of bit parts with a single line of dialogue, but that’s about it).  The movie fares better on the diversity front.  It’s still overwhelmingly white, but the two African-American cast members are both in positions of great responsibility and competence.  James Earl Jones plays Ryan’s boss, Admiral Greer, who trusts him and his opinions completely, in marked contrast to the rest of the military.  And Courtney B. Vance plays the sonar operator who’s the only person able to figure out how to track the Red October, and is generally portrayed as the smartest guy in the room every time he appears.


Unlike the other three spy movies I’ve covered (Remo Williams, Undercover Blues and Cloak & Dagger), The Hunt for Red October was a smash success, coming in at number six at the year’s box office in 1990.  It also got three Oscar nominations, winning one for Best Sound Editing.  However, I get the sense that this movie has been mostly forgotten as the franchise has moved in a much more conventional action movie direction.  Harrison Ford would replace Baldwin for the next two installments, and his Ryan is much more of a two-fisted protagonist, single-handedly foiling a terrorist attack and engaging in a fistfight with the villain at the end.  Further portrayals, up to and including the Amazon TV show with John Krasinski, have followed the Ford mold rather than the Baldwin one.  And that’s really a shame, as I think Baldwin’s take is the superior one, and that this movie is perhaps the best English-language submarine movie* ever made. 

Nostalgia: A-
Rewatch: A-

Stray Thoughts:

*The best submarine movie period is clearly the German film Das Boot

-I absolutely love Basil Poledouris’s score for this movie.  It uses a full chorus throughout, something that’s relatively uncommon both then and now.

-The way the movie handles the use of language might be one of my favorite “translation conventions” in all of cinema.  The movie begins with all of the Red October crew speaking Russian with subtitles.  When the political officer is meeting with Ramius to discuss their orders, he begins to read a Bible quotation from Ramius’s wife’s diary.  The camera pushes in on his mouth as he reads, until he gets to the word “Armageddon” – a word that is the same in both Russian and English.  It then pulls out, and the officer finishes the quote in English.  They all continue to speak English for the rest of the film, until the Americans finally come aboard the Red October - at which point everyone is back to speaking Russian again, except for Ramius, who is revealed to actually be fluent in English.