J.D. Hansel

1980s Movie Reviews

Heathers Review

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MINOR SPOILERS

Lately, it seems I’ve been in the mood to watch movies about bad teenagers committing extreme crimes.  I recently watched The Bling Ring, which focuses on the least likable people on the planet breaking into the homes of celebrities and stealing their priceless belongings.  It’s fascinating because it has the feeling of an Animal Planet documentary, giving the viewer a mostly objective look at the lives of creatures that don’t seem to be humans – at least not if my friends, family, peers, and roommates are the standard for “human.”  I thought that I liked it, until I saw the ’80s classic (and life-long member of everyone’s Netflix watch-list) Heathers, which takes a far more interesting approach.  While just as much a satire, this film largely throws realism to the wind and thrusts the audience into a world of mercilessly dark comedy.  I’m not sure exactly how much it made me laugh, but I will say that, when watching this movie, I had more fun – just pure and simple childlike giddiness – than I’ve had watching any other since Suspiria or Animal House – or maybe even my beloved Phantom of the Paradise.

Part of what makes this movie work so well is that it embraces cinema’s area of expertise: not truth, but “truthiness.”  Anyone who knows what my high school was like knows that my experience there did not resemble that of this film’s characters in any way, and yet everything about this movie feels weirdly familiar.  I’ve never met characters like the Heathers, but it feels like I’ve encountered them countless times.  It feels like every high school in America has these same jocks, these same nerds, and this same staff.  It’s almost like a bizarre take on Carrie, offering a chance to see justice done to the people in high school we all kind of wish were dead.  I think that’s why it resonates with so many people, and why it’s a great example of how cinema ought to function, at least in its comedies.

Oddly enough, this film struck me as being the high school equivelent to a film noir.  Perhaps it’s because of the odd, awkward dark tone matched with a bit of expressionism, or maybe it’s because of the situation the protagonist finds herself in, or maybe it’s because of the ending, but the whole thing feels like the filmmakers had been watching a lot of old films noirs when developing this story.  It particularly feels like noir when Veronica looks down at the dead body of the man she just shot, seemingly realizing that she killed him and starting to feel bad, and then she proceeds to shoot the other jock, without explanation.  I got a similar vibe when the film awkwardly tried to work in a message about how bad teen suicide is, with several references throughout to a song entitled, “Teenage Suicide (Don’t Do It).”  This message feels clumsily shoe-horned in, and it reminds me of all the times when the police officers in movies from the 1940s and 1950s explained to the characters (and, more importantly, to the audience) that the actions of the criminals were bad.  These are just some of the ways in which Heathers is both strange and familiar for movie-lovers, and maybe that’s what makes it hit the spot for me.

Ladyhawke Review

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One of the personal projects I’ve been meaning to start working on recently is writing an analysis of a sub-genre of fantasy.  I call it the “Eighties Fantasy Quest”, and it’s basically a genre for films that feel very much like ’80s movies, yet focus on an adventure through a world full of mythological characters, fairy tale creatures, “high fantasy” concepts, or new things that feel like they spring from one of these three territories.  Think of The NeverEnding Story, The Dark Crystal, Willow, Time Bandits, Return to Oz, Legend, Conan the Barbarian, and any other films from the ’80s that don’t just have a fantasy element but in fact seem to drown the viewer in magic, mythology, darkness, and dragons.  Obviously, this is a very diverse group of films, so I’ve been trying to find a way to map them out – separating the little girls from the big brutes and the films from Pythoners from the serious adventure thrillers.  To help me with this, I decided to watch a film that seems related to this genre and that’s considered an ’80s classic: Big Trouble in Little China.

I thought Big Trouble was fun and all, but I don’t think it was quite what I had in mind.  It fits into the genre, but for the most part, I didn’t feel like I was “taken away” to another world – and even Masters of the Universe, which largely takes place in our world, managed to give me that feeling.  As much as I enjoyed how immensely ’80s it is, I needed something with more magic, whimsy, and fairy tale-like qualities.  It also has a protagonist that’s more on the “barbarian” end of the spectrum of the EFQ genre – the place where hyper-masculinity is sold to the male viewers, although I couldn’t tell if the film was sincere about it.  Big Trouble has an odd tonal inconsistency in that Jack Burton is sometimes a joke – an American stereotype who thinks he’s invincible, unbeatable, and irresistible, but is actually an ignorant clown – and sometimes he’s genuinely cool.  Regardless, I needed something a little less macho and a little more “classical.”

Enter Ladyhawke, the high-fructose corn syrup to sugar’s Princess Bride – I know it’s not really quite as good, but at times it’s surprisingly very satisfying.  The Princess Bride certainly has the more memorable scenes, quotes, and characters, but Ladyhawke has a lot in its corner as well.  Conceptually, this is the kind of story one wants from a fantasy romance – something more than the usual “long-lost lover rescues damsel in distress from evil royal person” bit – offering a clever set-up for romantic tension and a unique reason for the audience to be concerned with the characters.  This movie doesn’t have as many fairy tale tropes as Princess Bride, or even Labyrinth, but the high concept at its core (which I refuse to spoil for those who haven’t seen the film yet) puts a distinctly “fairy tale” kind of magic at the heart of the story, making the film feel like a fairy tale storybook for adults.  I think with the benefit of a few trolls, wizards, giants, dwarfs, fairies, centaurs, goblins, or dragons, it would be just the kind of fantasy story I adore.

With that said, if we shift the focus away from what the film does not do and towards what the film does do, it doesn’t do anything too badly.  It’s playful with the “hero’s journey” arc, giving two (or perhaps three) characters the role of the hero against a villain whom the audience really wants to see killed.  Matthew Broderick’s accent is hilariously inconsistent, but that actually seems to add to the charm of his character, who has some very good dialogue and a cleverly-written ongoing chat with God.  The romance is completely believable, and the movie’s closing has just the right amount of heart in just the right way.  What really sells the story, however, is the score by Alan Parsons, whose band has recorded some of my favorite songs.  The music Parsons brings to the film makes excellent use of the ’80s synthesizer, giving the film that special quality of being both very timeless and very dated in the best way possible.  When all of its odd ingredients are put together, the result is an ’80s classic that will probably hit the spot for anyone in the mood for a truly magical love story.

Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid Review

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This film seems to have three aims: paying tribute to Classical Hollywood, parodying film noir, and successfully integrating actors from old movies into the film’s story only using footage of them taken from their classic films.  With its first goal, the film is successful.  The love that this crew and cast have for classic movies – down to the lights, sets, and costumes – is abundantly evident and infectious.  This is a perfectly serviceable “nostalgia fest,” but as a movie, it’s not that funny.  There are a few good laughs in the film, such as the spin on Lauren Bacall’s classic line, “Just put your lips together and blow,” but the comedy was generally underwhelming (and occasionally juvenile).  I think this is because the movie was both a tribute and a parody – it simply repeated elements of film noir and played them as parody if they seemed funny and as tribute if they weren’t.  Had the creative team focused more on putting comedic twists on the film noir tropes they were supposed to spoof, I think the movie could have been much better, but as it is, it almost seems as though the comedy was an afterthought.

For its third task, however, Dead Men is impressive and satisfying.  In a time before CGI, it’s hard to think of how Steve Martin could share a scene with a young Fred MacMurray, but this film pulls off the trick fairly convincingly.  It’s true that the difference between the scenes shot in the 1940s and the scenes shot in the 1980s is very noticeable from the film quality, but the effect is still better than Rogue One‘s cartoon Peter Cushing.  This is not only a technical feat, but a testament to great writing, masterfully crafting a story that can use old dialogue in new ways (besting even the interview collages of “Weird Al” Yankovic).  This third task is the part of the film that stands out – the part that shows Reiner and Martin’s intelligence.  So, as the saying goes, “two out of three ain’t bad,” but if the primary goal is for it to be entertaining and make people laugh, Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid leaves much to be desired.

When Harry Met Sally Review

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For those of us who didn’t grow up in the 1980s, it can be very difficult to imagine a time when Billy Crystal was young, handsome, and a viable romantic lead.  He seems like such a comic figure that it would be impossible for him to play a character with a lot of heart, and yet he’s perfectly cast in this film.  He fits into the character type of the street-wise all-American wise-cracker who never knows when to quit and who lives for the tickle of the feathers he ruffles.  Meg Ryan, by contrast, is the Bert to his Ernie – the straight man who lives a very orderly and particular life and must see to it that everything is precisely as it ought to be.  The idea of taking this kind of duo and watching it develop into a romance may not be entirely original to When Harry Met Sally, but this film does it especially well.

Perhaps the better pairing in the film, however, is not a couple of characters, but a duo behind the camera – Nora Ephron and Rob Reiner.  By this point in his career, Reiner had demonstrated that he could do comedies that were fairly brutal (This Is Spinal Tap) and love stories that had just the right amount of heart in just the right places (The Princess Bride).  Ephron, on the other hand, seemed to be best at making films in this particular genre with this particular sentiment, saturating her scripts in nostalgia and seeking out a way to keep the magic of Classical Hollywood believable in an age of cynicism.  Consequently, the two forces put together inevitably resulted in a film that has lots of laughs and lots of heart, never going too far with either.  Roger Ebert rightly noted that it has a resemblance to Woody Allen films, which largely has to do with the excellent choices of old jazz standards.  The structure of the film is rather unconventional and artistic in a way, which I attribute to the clever craftsmanship of these two creative forces.

I’ll concede that it took me a long time to finish the movie – I frequently took breaks from it for days and I rarely felt the compulsion to find out what happened next (which I blame on the story’s predictability) – but it was worth it to finish it.  It’s simply a pretty package of pure charm.

The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, & Her Lover Review

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I’ve been meaning to see this film for a long time – unlike most people my age, it’s been on my radar for years, and I have often joked about its incredibly long title.  Upon seeing it, I’ve found that it’s approximately what I thought it would be, only better.

It’s very much an artsy movie that seems to focus on visuals, themes, and cinematic experiments than entertaining, but it actually gets rather captivating and exciting in the second half.  The characters are, to my surprise, very interesting, with many characters I root for and one character who reminds me (and reminded the professor who was showing the film when I saw it) of a certain bushy-haired billionaire who’s been in the news lately.  The fear of “The Thief” intensifies as the film progresses, making for an intense and chilling third act.  All of this, of course, gets elevated and enhanced by the excellent soundtrack, and of course by some of the greatest visuals in cinema history.  Director Peter Greenaway seems to care very little for making a film that feels like real life, instead preferring a theatrical atmosphere, an unbelievable ending, and at least one subtle moment that is physically impossible (specifically the moment when a the wife’s dress changes colors instantly to match her surroundings).  While I must confess that some of it feels somewhat slow and boring, and there is definitely an aura of pseudo-intellectualism coupled with needless violence throughout, the film basically works because of its ironic conclusion, which is just as dramatic and chilling as it is ridiculously absurd.

It’s a bit awkward and grim for my tastes, but at least it’s fresh and well-done.

Scrooged Review

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Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert got into a big argument on their TV show back in the 1980s because of the film Back to the Future: Part II.  Ebert thought it was a perfectly enjoyable screwball comedy, but Siskel found it lacking in a certain quality that the first film in the series had.  “The first film had a heart to it, and I don’t think there’s any reason why a screwball comedy couldn’t take time out to have heart.  . . . I really found it kind of unpleasant to watch in a way.”  Ebert conceded that the first film moved the audience emotionally, and the second film didn’t do that, but I don’t understand what either of them were talking about here.  There’s nothing heartwarming about the story of a boy who doesn’t like his parents, and then inadvertently changes them into likable people and ends up richer.  I think people are desperate to see heart in a movie any chance they get, even if it doesn’t belong there, and when they can’t see it, they feel like the movie is missing something fundamental.  Frankly, this is nonsense.

Heart is a very delicate thing – it can easily turn to sap if the filmmaker isn’t careful, but it amazes me how many people will take heart even when it is sappy crap.  I’ll never understand how anyone can watch the climax of the movie Elf without vomiting rainbows and pooping out snowflakes – it’s just disgusting – but this is the only way most people want to feel when they watch a Christmas movie.  This is the only way I can make sense of Ebert’s very harsh review of 1988’s Scrooged, which he thought was so horribly lacking in the heart of the original story that it seemed to him like the filmmakers must not have read it, especially because of Murray’s particularly harsh performance in the film.  I, in turn, wonder if Ebert has ever read the story, because this film captures exactly what the story needs to be in order to be applicable to the modern era.

The original story by Dickens is not exactly a light, fun, and heartwarming story – at least not until the end.  Scrooge is a thoroughly horrible person, and it is very important to the story that he starts off without a shred of human decency.  He doesn’t care if the poor and hungry die, arguing it would “decrease the surplus population.”  While it may be tempting for some to feel that Murray should have been more like his funny characters in Ghostbusters and Groundhog Day, this would completely undercut the story’s message.  We want to be those characters in those films, but it is crucial that Murray’s character in this film is not very likable in this film – even a Tony Stark type would be too charming for the story to function.  Also, a writer that wants to be purely heartfelt and whimsical would use Faeries of Christmas Past, not ghosts, but this story is designed to be so eerie and dark that the light of Christmas morning is like a breath of fresh air for the reader.  Much like with Our Town, the story makes its case well because it forecasts death and doom, and it uses its darkness in order to keep the positive message from being so cheery as to seem unrealistic and so sweet as to seem disgusting, while also motivating the audience to live better lives.

It’s also important that the film take the heartless approach that it does to most of the film because it’s not a straight adaptation of the story: it’s a modern-day comedy, and that has different requirements than a traditional adaptation or a drama would.  Comedy, unlike what many people suppose, is not a particularly cheery genre by nature – it’s actually, in its purest form, quite brutal.  Comedy assaults the ego, making a mockery of humankind and all of its accomplishments, revealing absurdity in the things we hold most sacred, including Christmas.  This movie understands that, so it makes Murray a total jerk, the man he fires a drunken psycho, and the Ghost of Christmas Present a cartoony, merciless sadist, creating the sense that the film must have been directed by Yakko Warner or Daffy Duck.  It also modernizes the story with a  Nora Ephron approach before the films of Ephron’s era of romantic comedy even came out: it addresses the old story it’s retelling pretty directly, displays skepticism towards its relevance or believably in the post-Vietnam era, dismisses it as pure fiction, and then ultimately decides to go along with it anyway.  The films of the late ’80s and 1990s that revisited old stories and genres had a different audience that was not as willing to believe in stories with pure and concentrated heart, so the smart ones knew to tell the audiences that they knew the story was a silly fairy tale, and this allowed the audience to humor it anyway.  This film uses its dark humor wisely to give the audience the licence to believe in an otherwise unbelievable story, which is exactly what it needed to do.

It’s interesting to compare Scrooged to other modern Christmas classics, such as Elf, which have a lot more heart to them.  With Elf, not everything is sweet: his father is a jerk at the start, and the people of New York are initially reticent about embracing Christmas cheer, but these scenes with real-world problems and minor profanity are used to make the unrealistically jolly world where people say “cotton-headed ninny-muggins” seem entirely absurd.  The film then makes an awkward turn-around towards the end and insists that the world of jolliness must entirely trump the world of the normal people, as though the jolliness is inexplicably no longer absurd, but an important part of the human experience.  This is easily accepted by the people of New York without believable justification, and everything feels excruciatingly forced.  In Scrooged, on the other hand, nobody ever has to believe in the ghosts Murray encountered, and the characters only go along with Murray’s musical number because he’s crazy enough to fire them if they don’t and the TV crew is being held at gunpoint by a lunatic.  One film makes the case that faithful belief, even in something everyone in real life knows is obviously a lie, is intrinsically good, the other makes the case that we sometimes have to embrace a little bit of craziness because we’re a desperate, crazy species in a depraved, crazy world, which is clearly more honest and ethical.

In short, even though I have my issues with it, this is already one of my favorite Christmas movies.  It’s over-the-top, delightfully dark, and incredibly clever, even if it could use a few more laughs than it has.  It’s another one of those movies that feels like an ’80s movie should: it’s too dark for it to be made as a kid’s film today, but too childlike to be a movie for adults today, so it’s right in the sweet spot.  Its costumes, sets, and special effects are just right, and it even has a little bit of a Tim Burton feel to it, which is probably largely due to Danny Elfman’s perfectly fitting score.  I will say that I thought some of it could have been a little bit more original.  (For example, I got the impression that the Ghosts of Christmas Past wouldn’t be literal ghosts, but real people whom Murray’s character interprets to be the ghosts, but they went the boring literal way, which I guess worked out fine because of their unique casting choices for the first two ghosts.)  If you’re looking for Rankin-Bass levels of good holiday cheer, you and Roger Ebert can go look elsewhere, but this is the film I’m looking forward to watching at Christmastime for years to come.