The Natural (1984) – Blu-ray Disc

April 12, 2010Posted in1980s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Sports

*½/**** Image B- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Robert Redford, Robert Duvall, Glenn Close, Richard Farnsworth
screenplay by Phil Dusenberry and Roger Towne, based on the novel by Bernard Malamud
directed by Barry Levinson

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Looking up Barry Levinson’s The Natural on WIKIPEDIA, I came across this dopey quote from Bill Simmons, the ESPN reporter who goes by the insipid nickname The Sports Guy: “Any ‘Best Sports Movies’ list that doesn’t feature either Hoosiers or The Natural as the No. 1 pick shouldn’t even count.” This is why sportswriters have no business writing about movies. Aside from lacking the vocabulary necessary to analyze them (Michael Bamberger’s riveting hatchet job on M. Night Shyamalan, The Man Who Heard Voices, would read even better without so many painful sports metaphors taking the place of film terminology), they’re a maudlin lot, suckers for the human-interest story that ennobles their vocation and heightens the vicarious kick on which they as armchair jocks thrive. I’m betting Simmons hears Randy Newman’s triumphal score from The Natural while he’s brushing his teeth. (Hell, it’s probably his ringtone.) Assuming “sports movie” is not a handicap that some films are presumed to transcend–assuming that any movie featuring a protagonist whose life revolves around the playing or coaching of a single sport fits the bill, not just the uplifting ones–then I can think of at least ten titles more worthily crowned “Best Sports Movie” than Hoosiers or, especially, The Natural: Fat City, Raging Bull, Rocky, The Wrestler, Downhill Racer, The Hustler, Slap Shot, The Bad News Bears (original), and The Longest Yard (again, original). And that’s leaving subjectivity out of it as much as I know how. The problem, of course, is that only about half of those flicks send you out of the theatre feeling like a champion, whereas the rest traffic in, to borrow a phrase from The Bad News Bears, “moral” victories–which is bound to be anathema to guys like Simmons, who propagate hero myths for a living.

Clash of the Titans (1981) (DigiBook) – Blu-ray Disc

April 1, 2010Posted in1980s, 2010, Adventure, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Fantasy

***/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras C+
starring Harry Hamlin, Judi Bowker, Burgess Meredith, Laurence Olivier
screenplay by Beverley Cross
directed by Desmond Davis

Clashofthetitans81cap

by Bryant Frazer Clash of the Titans, a fast-and-loose assemblage of Greek mythology with the general look and feel of an Italian Hercules film, was a throwback even in 1981. Produced by Charles H. Schneer and Ray Harryhausen, whose previous collaborations included special-effects extravaganzas like Jason and the Argonauts, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, and The Valley of Gwangi (a western with dinosaurs!), the picture was conceived as a star vehicle for Harryhausen's ever-more-refined work animating miniature creatures frame by painstaking frame. As it turned out, Clash of the Titans was the ultimate–by which I mean final–showcase for the artist's technique.

Silverado (1985) – Blu-ray Disc

March 11, 2010Posted in1980s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Romance, Western

**/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras A-
starring Kevin Kline, Scott Glenn, Rosanna Arquette, John Cleese
screenplay by Lawrence Kasdan & Mark Kasdan
directed by Lawrence Kasdan

by Walter Chaw Lawrence Kasdan’s Silverado is a quintessential film of the 1980s, boasting that odd combination of slick production values and musty Eisenhower-era morality. It’s also exactly the western you’d expect from that product of the Eighties, Kasdan, screenwriter of milestones like Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Empire Strikes Back and writer-director of classics in adult contemporary ensemble mawkishness like The Big Chill and Grand Canyon. Kasdan should be considered historically as one of the film brats, a peer to guys like Spielberg who never quite developed enough muscle to allow movies to break their heart–fashioning from the medium an endless, deadening succession of handsome, movie-loving movies that consistently betray themselves with bullshit Hollywood endings brought home in triumphal swathes of swollen violins.

Commando (1985) [Director’s Cut] – DVD

March 2, 2010Posted in1980s, Action, Authors: Alex Jackson, DVD, Schwarzenegger

***½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rae Dawn Chong, Dan Hedaya, Vernon Wells
screenplay by Steven E. de Souza
directed by Mark L. Lester

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. I first saw Mark L. Lester’s Commando as a young boy and even then I was rather surprised that Arnold Schwarzenegger’s eponymous hero, John Matrix, didn’t get together with his reluctant sidekick, Cindy (Rae Dawn Chong). She’s set up to be the love interest, but the filmmakers never pull the trigger. I was similarly baffled by the saccharine relationship between Matrix and his daughter, Jenny (Alyssa Milano). In my youthful naivety, I frankly thought this was too hokey for an R-rated movie, i.e., a movie intended for grown-ups. What audience of adults would buy into this? And I couldn’t believe that the film would be about her kidnapping and Matrix tracking down and rescuing her. It’s just the hero invading the castle and saving the damsel-in-distress? Hell, Star Wars wasn’t that basic. There had to be some socio-political nuance to the situation I simply wasn’t old enough to grasp.

H.P. Lovecraft’s From Beyond (1986) [Unrated Director’s Cut] + Blood and Black Lace (1964) [Unslashed Collectors’ Edition] – DVDs

November 6, 2009Posted in****/****, 1960s, 1980s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, FFC Must-Own, France, Horror, Italy, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller, West Germany

From Beyond
**½/**** Image B Sound C+ Extras B
starring Jeffrey Combs, Barbara Crampton, Ken Foree, Ted Sorel
screenplay by Dennis Paoli
directed by Stuart Gordon

Sei donne per l'assassino
****/**** Image A- Sound B Extras A+
starring Cameron Mitchell, Eva Bartok, Thomas Reiner, Mary Arden
screenplay by Giuseppe Barilla, Marcel Fonda, Marcello Fondato and Mario Bava
directed by Mario Bava

Mustown

BLOOD AND BLACK LACE

by Walter Chaw Stuart Gordon's follow-up to his flat-awesome Re-Animator reunites that film's Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton with source material by H.P. Lovecraft for From Beyond1, a nominal splatter classic that lacks the energy and cohesiveness of Re-Animator, even as it establishes Gordon as a director with a recognizable, distinctive vision. A picture that arrived concurrently with Clive Barker's "The Hellbound Heart" (the source material for Hellraiser), it's useful as a means by which Lovecraft's and Barker's fiction can be paired against one another as complementary halves of a symbolist, grue-soaked whole. With the latter's cenobites, his most enduring contribution to popular culture2, consider that Barker's vision of an alternate, infernal reality shimmering just beneath the surface of the mundane has its roots in Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos–a dimension of Elder Gods lurking behind the doors of perception. Lovecraft and Barker give description to the indescribable, name to the nameless. They are in pursuit of the sublime and their quest underscores the idea that any such chase is, at its heart, inevitably a spiritual one.

Night of the Creeps (1986) [Director’s Cut] – Blu-ray Disc

October 30, 2009Posted in1980s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Horror, Sci-Fi, Zombie

*/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Jason Lively, Steve Marshall, Jill Whitlow, Tom Atkins
written and directed by Fred Dekker

by Walter Chaw A childhood favourite, Fred Dekker's Night of the Creeps generally underscores the danger of revisiting childhood favourites with a jaundiced eye; this and his sophomore feature, The Monster Squad, show that Dekker was rejected from the USC and UCLA film schools for a reason. I realize it's all supposed to be a cozy, funny-scary homage to the terribleness of low-budget B-movies as a genre unto themselves, but the picture is terribly edited and disastrously paced–the very things that effectively kill both comedy and horror. Unconvinced? The first misstep might be its choice to leave a charming, 1950s-set black-and-white prologue in favour of a faux-Hughesian '80s fandango that, like most of the era's mainstream teen dramas not made by John Hughes, lacks an ear for how we actually talked, and insight into how we actually felt. In any case, it's hopelessly incongruous to go from Ozzie & Harriet to leg-warmers and Wall of Voodoo, resulting in something that isn't a spoof of bad filmmaking so much as an example of it. Night of the Creeps joins The Goonies for me as one of those cult classics I just can't wrap my head around. I remember sort of loving it when I was twelve, meaning only that twelve-year-olds are idiots.

The New York Ripper (1982) – Blu-ray Disc

October 27, 2009Posted in1980s, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Blue Underground, Crime, Horror

**/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Jack Hedley, Almanta Keller, Howard Ross, Paolo Malco
screenplay by Gianfranco Clerici, Vincenzo Mannino, Lucio Fulci, Dardano Sacchetti
directed by Lucio Fulci

Newyorkrippercap

by Bryant Frazer The box art for this Lucio Fulci sleazefest describes it as "The Most Controversial Horror Film Ever Made," which is a stretch. "Notorious" would be a better word. The New York Ripper's main claim to fame is its reputation as a sadistic, gory, and generally misogynist giallo–the Italian term referring to a combination of the crime and horror genres (basically a whodunit with slasher elements) that became popular in the 1960s and endured through the 1970s. Released in 1982 and styled after the psychologically ambitious thrillers of Hitchcock, it bears roughly the same relationship to the gialli film cycle that, say, Touch of Evil does to film noir. If the Fulci film isn't exactly as self-aware as the Welles one, it still functions as a capper, a fitting culmination of a particular form.

Stop Making Sense (1984) – Blu-ray Disc

October 13, 2009Posted in****/****, 1980s, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Concert Doc, Directors: Jonathan Demme, FFC Must-Own, Music

Stopmakingsensecap

****/**** Image B Sound A Extras A-
directed by Jonathan Demme

Mustownby Bryant Frazer Stop Making Sense opens sparely, with a close-up of a man striding onto an empty stage. By “empty stage,” I don’t mean a bare stage, exactly. I mean a big empty theatre space–it’s basically a rectangular room behind a proscenium, illuminated by bare light bulbs dangling overhead–with furniture, ladders, scaffolding, and the like cluttered near the walls. It feels less like a performance is about to begin than like a rehearsal or, maybe more to the point, an audition. And by “close-up,” I don’t mean a tight shot on the man’s face. Rather, we are looking at his lower extremities–white shoes, white pants–in a Steadicam shot that follows him to a waiting microphone stand. He plops a boombox down beside him and announces, in a faux-naïf voice, “I have a tape I want to play.” If you know the Talking Heads, you’ll recognize this immediately as David Byrne’s shtick. But if this film is your introduction to the band–as it was for teenaged me–there may be something off-putting about the whole precious set-up. “What’s up with this fucking twerp,” I remember thinking, “and his art-damaged affectations?” I quickly learned the joke was on me.

St. Elmo’s Fire (1985) + About Last Night… (1986) – Blu-ray Discs

October 13, 2009Posted in1980s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Romance, ZERO STARS

ST. ELMO’S FIRE
ZERO STARS/**** Image A- Sound C+ Extras C
starring Emilio Estevez, Rob Lowe, Andrew McCarthy, Demi Moore
screenplay by Joel Schumacher & Carl Kurlander
directed by Joel Schumacher

ABOUT LAST NIGHT…
½*/**** Image C- Sound C Extras C
starring Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, James Belushi, Elizabeth Perkins
screenplay by Tim Kazurinsky & Dennis DeClue, based on the play Sexual Perversity in Chicago by David Mamet
directed by Edward Zwick

by Walter Chaw The Brat Pack as a phenomenon is something that largely, blissfully escaped this child of the Eighties–just a touch too young, just a tad too disinterested. When Sixteen Candles came out, I was embarrassed by the Asian caricature enough to avoid talking about it (ditto The Goonies and Temple of Doom–though not, oddly enough, The Karate Kid); when St. Elmo’s Fire came out, I was busy sneaking into consecutive showings of Back to the Future. I remember a party where The Breakfast Club was playing in the background, and a girl I had a crush on exclaiming how much she loved it. Later, they played A Nightmare on Elm Street, and whoever’s mother it was at whoever’s house it was broke up the festivities not long after the bodybag in the hall. (I don’t know that I ever saw either movie in its entirety until I was well into my twenties.) Ferris Bueller was my connection to John Hughes, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Marty McFly were my thing–not a Molly Ringwald in sight. The closest I came to assimilation was Red Dawn, which, while awful, is also awesome in a deadening, testosterone-sick way. Looking back, the moment the ’80s matured for me was Near Dark, The Evil Dead, Predator, and David Cronenberg’s The Fly and not, as it was for many people in my peer group, Pretty in Pink and Some Kind of Wonderful. I remember hosting a sweltering screening of Broadcast News in my bedroom with a couple of dozen pals, a considerably less well-attended showing of Angel Heart a few weeks later, and a private viewing of Pump Up the Volume with a girl I really liked and to whom I crystallized my theory of how it was always better to watch a movie in the theatre…but not tonight. It was a hot evening. All my memories of movies in the ’80s are accompanied by suffocating heat. The decade in my memory is one long summer.

The Dark Crystal (1982) [Superbit] + [25th Anniversary Edition] – DVDs|Blu-ray Disc

September 20, 2009Posted in1980s, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Muppets, UK

***/****
Superbit DVD – Image B Sound C+
Anniversary DVD – Image A Sound B+ Extras A
BD – Image B+ Sound B+ Extras A
screenplay by David Odell
directed by Jim Henson and Frank Oz

by Bill Chambers When Jim Henson passed away in 1990, he left behind a diverse legion of fans and a company whose ultimate success, it now seems, hinged on his input. Jim Henson Productions and The Creature Shop are still thriving financially, but as the past few Muppet films (or that silly-looking computer-generated monkey from Lost In Space) demonstrate, the thrill and genius are gone. I'm positive that The Dark Crystal made today by Henson's successors would not provoke from an audience of kids five to fifty the same spellbound response the 1982 original does. Which is not to say there isn't room for improvement.

Fatal Attraction (1987) + Indecent Proposal (1993) – Blu-ray Discs

September 9, 2009Posted in1980s, 1990s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Romance, Thriller

FATAL ATTRACTION
**/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras A
starring Michael Douglas, Glenn Close, Anne Archer, Stuart Pankin
screenplay by James Dearden
directed by Adrian Lyne

INDECENT PROPOSAL
½/**** Image C+ Sound B Commentary C-
starring Robert Redford, Demi Moore, Woody Harrelson, Oliver Platt
screenplay by Amy Holden Jones
directed by Adrian Lyne

by Walter Chaw Adrian Lyne films live and die by the success of their moments of poignant epiphany. It’s why 9½ Weeks and Jacob’s Ladder work and Flashdance and Indecent Proposal do not–why his obvious and constant pandering to cultural stereotypes and softcore eroticism identifies him as the premiere commercial director of his time (more so than even Ridley Scott, who sometimes tries not to be a ponce), trafficking in easy images and the kind of strained tableaux you’d expect to see in a first-year photography classes (explanation as well for why his films are almost invariably blockbusters): a pair of Converse sneakers on a lonesome, foldout kitchen table; seagulls on a fog-shrouded pier; long shots down cluttered, penthouse-suite corridors; rubbing off to a slideshow1; dogs and bunnies… Adrian Lyne flicks are about what happens when dicks slip into chicks, oops; it’s not possible to make fun of them, because how do you make fun of an artifact that has no intrinsic weight, tells no compelling tale, and imparts no particular insight?

Fire and Ice (1983) [2-Disc Limited Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

August 31, 2009Posted in1980s, 2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Blu-ray Disc, Blue Underground, Documentary, DVD, Fantasy

FIRE AND ICE
**½/****
DVD – Image A+ Sound A (DD)/A+ (DTS) Extras B+
BD – Image A Sound A Extras B
screenplay by Roy Thomas and Gerry Conway
directed by Ralph Bakshi

FRAZETTA: PAINTING WITH FIRE (2003)
*½/****
directed by Lance Laspina

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There's something poignant about the barbarian fantasy that makes it hard to dismiss. Though I long ago abandoned the adolescent nerd's love of sword-handling macho men and their quivering female conquests, I still find the genre's tangled web of sexual denials endlessly fascinating–and highly incriminating to any boy who leafed through his "Dungeons & Dragons" manuals with less than pure thoughts on his mind. Very obviously, the whole thing revolves around sex–the sensual idea of standing nearly naked and pulsing with fury while the object of your desire writhes at your feet. But there's a sense in which it can't admit this–it has to drag in a mythological sturm-und-drang in order to justify itself as drama, when in fact it just wants to touch itself. And the sad phenomenon of talking about something without talking about it is strangely moving.

Starman (1984) – Blu-ray Disc

August 10, 2009Posted in1980s, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: John Carpenter, Romance, Sci-Fi

***½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Jeff Bridges, Karen Allen, Charles Martin Smith, Richard Jaeckel
screenplay by Bruce A. Evans & Raynold Gideon
directed by John Carpenter

Starmancap

by Bryant Frazer Strange as it may sound, back in the early-1980s this gentle yet seriously weird fantasy about a woman who drives a socially-challenged clone of her dead husband across the U.S. (so he can rendezvous with his spaceship) was actually considered a safe commercial bet for the embattled director John Carpenter. Carpenter was always an avowed fan of traditional Hollywood entertainments, and he claimed to be attracted to making Starman as a contemporary version of It Happened One Night, Frank Capra's prototypical screwball comedy about an antagonistic couple who learn to love one another on the road. It seemed like an unlikely gearshift for Carpenter, who had recently remade The Thing from Another World as a tense, supremely chilling, and truly horrific metaphor for paranoia. But for the man who had his ass handed to him when that masterpiece had the bad luck to open not only in a moviegoing environment that had turned hostile to horror, but also directly opposite the ripely sentimental box-office juggernaut E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, Starman represented something else. It wasn't merely an opportunity for Carpenter to helm a fundamentally good-natured, optimistic science-fiction film–it was possibly a chance to rehabilitate his career.

Blue Thunder (1983) [Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

July 20, 2009Posted in1980s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, DVD, Thriller

**/****
DVD – Image B+ Sound A Extras A-
BD – Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Roy Scheider, Warren Oates, Candy Clark, Daniel Stern
screenplay by Dan O'Bannon & Don Jakoby
directed by John Badham

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover When I was in university, the off-campus students always had a cast-off '80s couch in their shared houses and apartments–you would go to a party and without fail encounter something upholstered in what looked like tan burlap with a collection of thick and thin brown or rust stripes close to the centre. I honestly couldn't remember seeing anything so horrid in anyone's house I knew during the '80s, but now that it was there in front of me, it brought back all the uncool childhood memories that the decade's official style story lives to deny. Blue Thunder is exactly like that couch: it's a ridiculous farrago of clichés intended to turn the cop movie into Star Wars (and The Parallax View into both) that winds up roping in a variety of cheesy tropes most people would rather forget they once responded to–though I dare say anyone of a certain generation will grin at least a little at what once passed for entertainment.

Spaceballs (1987) [Collector’s Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

June 28, 2009Posted in1980s, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Satire, Sci-Fi

**/****
DVD – Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
BD – Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Mel Brooks, John Candy, Rick Moranis, Bill Pullman
screenplay by Mel Brooks & Thomas Meehan & Ronny Graham
directed by Mel Brooks

Spaceballscapby Bill Chambers Neither the audacity of Mel Brooks's perpetually relevant Blazing Saddles nor the movie-love that manifested itself in his uncanny genre parodies Young Frankenstein and High Anxiety inhabit Brooks's Spaceballs, a spoof tailored to the undiscriminating palate of preteens and people who can't resist a joke at the expense of Star Wars hobbyists. It is, in other words, Brooks's very own Return of the Jedi, and although it's being reissued in a Collector's Edition DVD to capitalize on the release of Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, it's not really in a position to take the piss out of the new Star Wars trilogy. In fact, the most interesting thing about Spaceballs circa 2005 is that what was once spectacularly stale–by the time it came out, the first wave of Star Wars mania had passed–now elicits nostalgia for a Star Wars saga that was so classical and (visually / narratively / allegorically) uncluttered as to lend itself to burlesque. Because nothing in the current "episodes" has a prayer of becoming an institution, a contemporary Spaceballs would just be a succession of insults–you can't mock Jar Jar Binks with any affection.

Roxanne (1987) – Blu-ray Disc

June 24, 2009Posted in1980s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Comedy, Romance

*½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Steve Martin, Daryl Hannah, Shelley Duvall, Rick Rossovich
screenplay by Steve Martin, based on the play “Cyrano de Bergerac” by Edmond Rostand
directed by Fred Schepisi

by Walter Chaw After The Devil’s Playground and The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith–both appearing in the middle of the Australian New Wave–the conventional wisdom was that Fred Schepisi was someone to watch. Then Hollywood called and he did what fellow ‘wavers Peter Weir and Phillip Noyce did, punching the timecard on shit like Patriot Games, Sliver, and Dead Poets Society. A re-telling of Cyrano de Bergerac, Edmund Rostand’s play about a proboscis-challenged swordsman armed with the Blarney (in spades), Schepisi’s noxious Roxanne stars a downhill-sliding Steve Martin and a Daryl Hannah who didn’t yet know that Blade Runner and Splash would be the only things anyone would know her for until a career resurrection of sorts some 15 years later with Kill Bill. I used to love this film. Time has been unkind.

2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984) – Blu-ray Disc

June 2, 2009Posted in1980s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller

2010
*/**** Image B- Sound B- Extras F
starring Roy Scheider, John Lithgow, Helen Mirren, Bob Balaban
screenplay by Peter Hyams, based on the novel 2010: Odyssey Two by Arthur C. Clarke
directed by Peter Hyams

by Walter Chaw As we slide ever closer to the reality of artificial intelligence, the question of functional equivalence becomes ever more pressing to our sense of ourselves. It's because of this, I think, that Peter Hyams's 2010 seems more pertinent now than it necessarily did in 1984. I watched Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey for the first time just a few months before I saw 2010 (this would be the summer of '84; I was twelve years old), and to that pre-teen me, 2010 gave the impression in most ways of being the better film. It appeals to the pragmatist instead of the philosopher, to the childish belief that there is nothing without an explanation under the sun and that should we encounter an alien intelligence, it will inevitably have the same desires and motivations we do. My first viewing of 2001 left me feeling angry and bored–the moments that tickled at something greater weren't moments I was able to isolate and examine (I wouldn't learn the term mysterium tremens until at least a decade later)–and in a sense 2010 allowed me to appreciate the Kubrick picture as a linear narrative. Which is, after all, not the point, and perhaps even ultimately destructive of 2001. It's easy to understand benevolence (whether it's from an alien "creator" to us, its possible creations, or from us to our machine creations), because benevolence is within the human capacity to comprehend. It's much harder to understand an astronaut waking up in a hotel room after a trip down the rabbit hole and then coming back to Earth as a glowing fetus.

Never Say Never Again (1983) – Blu-ray Disc

May 12, 2009Posted in1980s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, Espionage, James Bond, Thriller, UK

*½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Sean Connery, Klaus Maria Brandauer, Max Von Sydow, Edward Fox
screenplay by Lorenzo Semple, Jr.
directed by Irvin Kershner

by Ian Pugh After decades of legal wrangling, producer Kevin McClory had finally won the right to make an autonomous James Bond flick out of Ian Fleming's Thunderball, and 1983 seemed like the perfect time to capitalize on it, what with resident Bond Roger Moore's age catching up with him and the original series running out of steam as a consequence. A household name, the character of Bond has enough cultural heft and influence that he warrants interpretations from independent sources besides, and given that Sean Connery was lured out of a twelve-year retirement from the character–hence the title, Never Say Never Again–as well as the room for improvement left by the original Thunderball, the film had the potential to be more than just a cynical cash-in.

WarGames (1983) [25th Anniversary Edition] + Saturday Night Fever (1977)/Staying Alive (1983) [Double Feature] – DVDs|Saturday Night Fever [30th Anniversary Special Collector’s Edition]- Blu-ray Disc

May 4, 2009Posted in****/****, 1970s, 1980s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coming of Age, Drama, Espionage, FFC Must-Own, Music, Sci-Fi, Stallone, Teen, Thriller, ZERO STARS

War Games
***½/**** Image B Sound C Extras A
starring Matthew Broderick, Dabney Coleman, John Wood, Ally Sheedy
screenplay by Lawrence Lasker & Walter F. Parkes
directed by John Badham

SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER
****/****
DVD – Image B Sound B+ Extras C
BD – Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring John Travolta, Karen Gorney, Barry Miller, Joseph Cali
screenplay by Norman Wexler
directed by John Badham

STAYING ALIVE
ZERO STARS/**** Image C+ Sound B+
starring John Travolta, Cynthia Rhodes, Finola Hughes, Steve Inwood
screenplay by Sylvester Stallone and Norman Wexler
directed by Sylvester Stallone

by Walter Chaw I hadn't realized until I watched the 25th Anniversary Edition DVD of it how intimately WarGames is embedded in my psyche. I saw it in the theatre as a ten-year-old in 1983 and, for the rest of that decade (the prime of my excited filmgoing experience), I didn't know that movies were ever different. The first time, in fact, that I recognized that movies were human was the first time they revealed themselves as something that could fail to inspire any kind of response at all–and I wonder if that initial moment of disappointment had more to do with the development of my cynicism than any one picture's deficiency. Film is a progressive addiction, says one theory: the more sophisticated you get as a viewer, the harder it is to find the fix. WarGames presented me with the idea of eroticism through mild scatological exhibitionism. It had a young man in his room, alone with a young woman, excusing himself to urinate in the next room–an act unthinkable to me as a ten-year-old, and holding with it the thrill of taboo. The next time they meet, the world starts to explode and, better yet, the girl traps the boy between her legs when he tries to edge by.

Dead & Buried (1981) [Limited Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc + I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) [Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

January 22, 2009Posted in1980s, 1990s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Blue Underground, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

DEAD & BURIED
***/****
DVD – Image B- Sound C+ (Remixes)/B (Mono) Extras A
BD – Image B+ Sound B Extras A-
starring James Farentino, Melody Anderson, Jack Albertson, Lisa Blount
screenplay by Ronald Shusett and Dan O'Bannon
directed by Gary A. Sherman

I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER
**/****
DVD|BD – Image A- Sound A Extras A-
starring Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ryan Phillippe, Freddie Prinze, Jr.
screenplay by Kevin Williamson, based on the novel by Lois Duncan
directed by Jim Gillespie

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Gary A. Sherman's Dead & Buried and Jim Gillespie's I Know What You Did Last Summer, released theatrically fourteen years apart, together demonstrate that the more the horror genre stays the same, the more it changes. Each of these B-movies resorts to similar cheap tricks (first and foremost a coastal setting (the atmospheric equivalent of a non-perishable in horror)) and traffics in pessimism, yet one is genuinely hopeless and the other is trendily nihilistic–karo syrup as late-Nineties fashion accessory. A great gulf stands between the sensibilities of the two pictures that's unearthed by drawing other such subtle distinctions: one is cruel, the other callous; one is about death, the other about killing; one is sexy, the other exploitive; and so on and so forth. Virtually indescribable to modern audiences despite its familiar elements, Dead & Buried is a Darwinian fossil of the horror cinema, whose DNA has been perverted by the progressive commercialization of the culture and weakening of the intellectual position. Simplified: Current scare flicks still sometimes enjoy provocative subtext (like the recent Freddy Vs. Jason); more often, they die on the vine from WB-itis.