Once Upon a Zeitgeist: Blue City (1986); Top Gun (1986); The Lost Boys (1987); Bull Durham (1988)

August 5, 2008Posted in1980s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Tony Scott, Drama, DVD, Horror, Sports, Teen, Thriller, Tom Cruise, Vampire

80sdiscstitle

BLUE CITY – DVD
ZERO STARS/**** Image C- Sound C-
starring Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy, Paul Winfield, Scott Wilson
screenplay by Lukas Heller and Walter Hill, based on the novel by Ross MacDonald
directed by Michelle Manning

TOP GUN [Widescreen Special Collector’s Edition] – DVD + [Special Collector’s Edition] Blu-ray Disc
*/****
DVD – Image B Sound B+ Extras B
BD – Image B+ Sound A+ (DTS) A- (DD) Extras B
starring Tom Cruise, Kelly McGillis, Val Kilmer, Anthony Edwards
screenplay by Jim Cash & Jack Epps, Jr.
directed by Tony Scott

THE LOST BOYS [Two-Disc Special Edition] – DVD
***/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras C+
starring Corey Feldman, Jami Gertz, Corey Haim, Dianne Wiest
screenplay by Janice Fischer & James Jeremias and Jeffrey Boam
directed by Joel Schumacher

BULL DURHAM [Collector’s Edition] – DVD
**/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Kevin Costner, Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins, Trey Wilson
written and directed by Ron Shelton

by Walter Chaw Released in 1986 and tonally identical to contemporary suck classics The Wraith and Wisdom, the Brat Pack travesty Blue City represents the nadir of a year that produced Blue Velvet, Down By Law, The Mosquito Coast, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Sid and Nancy, Aliens, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, The Fly, Big Trouble in Little China, Something Wild, Mona Lisa, and Night of the Creeps, for starters. It’s the quintessence of why people remember the 1980s as a terrible decade for film, poor in every single objective measure of quality. Consider a central set-piece where our hero Billy (Judd Nelson) and his buck-toothed cohort Joey (David Caruso) stage a weird re-enactment of the heist from The Killing at a dog track that includes not only such bon mots as “I’m new at this! Give me a break!” but also the dumbest diversionary tactic in the history of these things as Joey tosses a prime cut on the track in front of a frankly startled/quickly delighted pack of muzzled greyhounds. Then again, it’s not a bad metaphor for the Me Generation and its blockbuster mentality. After cracking wise a few times in a way that makes one wonder if he’s suddenly become a Republican, Billy blows on the barrel of his gun in his best John Ireland-meets-Montgomery Clift and professional bad editor Ross Albert (the whiz kid behind Bushwhacked, The Beverly Hillbillies, and The Pest) cracks a little wise himself by cutting to a rack of hot dogs. Unfortunately, suggesting that Judd Nelson is gay as a French holiday is only mildly wittier than suggesting the same of clearly gay Tom Cruise. More on that when we get to Top Gun.

Mission: Impossible III (2006)

May 5, 2006Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Espionage, Germany, Italy, Theatrical, Thriller, Tom Cruise

*/****
starring Tom Cruise, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ving Rhames, Billy Crudup
screenplay by Alex Kurtzman & Roberto Orci & J.J. Abrams
directed by J.J. Abrams

Mi3by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. That classic combination of a film that doesn't make any sense with one that doesn't inspire anyone to invest an iota of emotion in giving a crap, J.J. Abrams's Mission: Impossible III (hereafter M:i:III) isn't convoluted like the first two instalments so much as it's just incoherent and loud. It's the camera-in-a blender-school of action filmmaking: There's so little understanding of spatial relationships that the whole thing plays like that Naked Gun gag where the gunfight is taking place between two people within arm's reach of one another. An extended heist sequence set in Vatican City, for instance, features the four members of IMF ("Impossible Mission Force") hotshot Ethan Hunt's (Tom Cruise) team (Ving Rhames, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, and the requisite hot Asian chick (Maggie Q)) running around in completely anonymous locations, sticking doodads to walls, and confirming to one another that they're "ready" and "in place." But without knowledge of their plan, their location (respective to one another and their goal, whatever that might be), their peril, or the stakes, you're left with four people doing something for some reason, necessitating our willingness to play along with the charade that we know who these people are, what their goal is, and why we should care. Consider a helicopter chase through a wind farm, too, and the many lovely visuals that such an enticing premise suggests–then look to the end-product, which is a lot of tight shots of helicopters in the middle of the night, parts of giant windmills, a bad soundtrack, and multiple decibel screaming about "incoming" and "they've got a lock on us." Who does? And where are they going on that wind farm? And why does the promise of an instrument-factory explosion induce yawns?

The Last Samurai (2003) + The Girl from Paris (2003)

December 5, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, France, Japan, New Zealand, Theatrical, Tom Cruise

THE LAST SAMURAI
**½/****
starring Tom Cruise, Billy Connolly, Tony Goldwyn, Shin Koyamada
screenplay by John Logan and Marshall Herskovitz & Edward Zwick
directed by Edward Zwick

Une hirondelle a fait le printemps
***/****
starring Michel Serrault, Mathilde Seigner, Jean-Paul Roussillon, Frédéric Pierrot
screenplay by Christian Carion and Eric Assous
directed by Christian Carion

Lastsamuraiby Walter Chaw Concerned with the encroachment of technology, spawned by the humanism of the French Revolution, Romanticism as a movement in poetry is involved in nostalgia for an idealized Natural history. On film, it occasionally manifests itself in period pieces that focus on the encroachment and proliferation of the railroad: its engines (as in King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun and Beyond the Forest, or the Hughes Brothers’ From Hell) the manifestation of the industrial revolution in terms of hellmouths and serpents–William Blake’s “Tyger” burning bright in the forests of a primordial night, all-consuming and inexorable. That loss of ritual to the march of time, tradition and heritage falling before the metal chimera of technology finds itself articulated in two very different films: Edward Zwick’s curious, derivative, workmanlike The Last Samurai, and Christian Carion’s bleak and affecting The Girl from Paris (Une hirondelle a fait le printemps).

Austin Powers in Goldmember (2002) [infinifilm] – DVD

November 19, 2002Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Espionage, Sci-Fi, Tom Cruise

*½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Mike Myers, Beyoncé Knowles, Michael York, Michael Caine
screenplay by Mike Myers & Michael McCullers
directed by Jay Roach

by Walter Chaw In the grand tradition of Final Chapter – Walking Tall, the third film in the Austin Powers franchise, Austin Powers in Goldmember, begins and ends with our hero watching himself being portrayed by someone else in a movie of his life–a level of post-modern reflexivity that is taken to such grotesque heights by the film that what emerges is actually fascinating in a detached, unpleasant, deeply unfunny sort of way. Mike Myers’s obsession with body distortion and cannibalistic consumption and auto-consumption likewise reaches a macabre pinnacle in the picture’s best running gag–the preoccupation with Fred Savage’s mole with a mole–and with a new circus geek for the Myers pantheon (joining blue-eyed bald albino Dr. Evil and Shrekian Scot Fat Bastard), the Dutch villain Goldmember, who makes it a habit to eat giant flakes of his own skin. We meet Goldmember (so named for his prosthetic bullion bar and ingots) in another bit of multi-layered absurdity during a time-travel journey to New York circa 1975 and the fictional Studio 69, with Myers referencing his own most critically praised performance as Studio 54’s perverse Steve Rubell. A study of Myers’s Dick Tracy-like mania with latex appliances would no doubt fill volumes.

Vanilla Sky (2001) – DVD

May 18, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Esoterica, Mystery, Romance, Sci-Fi, Spain, Thriller, Tom Cruise

*/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Tom Cruise, Penélope Cruz, Kurt Russell, Cameron Diaz
screenplay by Cameron Crowe, based on the screenplay for Abre Los Ojos by Alejandro Amenábar and Mateo Gil
directed by Cameron Crowe

by Walter Chaw Vanilla Sky is an unpleasant, incompetent, and laborious amalgam of Jacob’s Ladder and The Game, Joe Eszterhas doing Frank Herbert, if you will. It is profane to no good end, forcing Cameron Diaz to define her sexuality through roughly a dozen variations on “I swallowed your come,” and is otherwise so sloppily assembled that even the generally arresting Jason Lee is made irritating and superfluous. Cameron Crowe is rapidly becoming a self-indulgent, disingenuous disaster–his films grow more pretentious as his subjects shrink in consequence. After tackling a rose-coloured breed of aggrandizing nostalgia in the overlong Almost Famous, he’s decided to remake the mediocre Spanish film Open Your Eyes (“Abre Los Ojos”)by flavour of the month Alejandro Amenábar, paying alleged “homage” to about a dozen other directors, movies, and album covers while displaying exactly the same breed of star-deifying that he ostensibly deflated in Almost Famous. Crowe fans should prepare to be disheartened by the realization that the crown prince of weakling uplift has actually fallen down on the altar of the ultimate Kafkaesque Hollywood godhead: Tom Cruise.

Without Limits (1998)

September 11, 1998Posted in1990s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Biopic, Drama, Sports, Theatrical, Tom Cruise

**/****
starring Billy Crudup, Donald Sutherland, Monica Potter, Jeremy Sisto
screenplay by Robert Towne and Kenny Moore
directed by Robert Towne

by Bill Chambers Does Robert Towne deserve his reputation as a Hollywood Great? (I'm not playing Devil's Advocate here.) After all, Roman Polanski is responsible for Chinatown's brilliant ending (Towne, its screenwriter, bowed out when Polanski opted to alter his comparatively bittersweet finale); Warren Beatty extensively reshaped his screenplay for Shampoo; Towne caved to studio pressure and destroyed the climax of his sophomore feature as writer-director, Tequila Sunrise; and it took him several years to pen the misfire Love Affair.